Trump Is Stocking His Administration With the People Behind Project 2025 (2024)

In July, Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social that he knew “nothing about Project 2025.”

“I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and, unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it. The Radical Left Democrats are having a field day, however, trying to hook me into whatever policies are stated or said. It is pure disinformation on their part,” he added.

Fast forward a few months. Trump has won the election, and as he fills out the highest ranks of his incoming administration, the links between his new government and the figures behind Heritage Foundation’s extremist policy package couldn’t be more clear.

According to a Friday report from NBC News, Trump’s transition team is using Project 2025’s infamous personell database to vet potential hires for administration roles.

“There’s a lot of positions to fill and we continue to send names over, including ones from the database as they are conservative, qualified and vetted,” one source who worked on Project 2025 told NBC News. “Hard to find 4,000 solid people, so we are happy to help.”

At least five of Trump’s high level nominees and appointees have direct ties to Project 2025, and the president-elect is reported to be considering an author of the project, Russ Vought, to head the White House Budget Office.

Vought served as director of the same office during Trump’s first term, and is plotting a much more radical agenda under the president-elect’s second administration. He authored the section of Project 2025 focused on the expansion of presidential powers and executive authority, and was tapped to head the Republican National Committee’s 2024 policy platform committee.

In his chapter, Vought outlined his aims to purge the “sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences — or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country,” and instead concentrate more power in the presidency.

Alongside Vought, Trump has tapped figures like Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, John Ratcliffe Karoline Leavitt, and Brendan Carr — who were all involved in the project — to fill out the ranks of the administration and assist in the implementation of policy goals like mass deportations, increased restrictions on reproductive freedoms,, and a purge of federal workers.

Miller, who served as a chief policy adviser and speechwriter in Trump’s first administration, has been tapped to serve as White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy. His focus will likely be the execution of plans to round up and deport millions of undocumented migrants. Miller’s conservative legal activist group — America First Legal — served as an advisory organization to Project 2025. Miller himself was featured in videos produced by The Heritage Foundation promoting the project.

Trump’s new White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt appeared in the same series of Project 2025 videos as Miller. Leavitt, who served in the White House during Trump’s first term and as has 2024 campaign’s National Press Secretary, was one of the prominent figures attempting to distance Trump’s candidacy from Project 2025. In the video, titled “The Art of Professionalism,” Leavitt advises potential political appointees on how to succeed in their new jobs. “Best of luck, and if you need us as a resource, we are here to help,” she says.

Later, when questioned about Trump’s connections to Project 2025, Leavitt told right wing YouTuber Steven Crowder that Trump had “unveiled hundreds of policy proposals on his website, DonaldJTrump.com, Agenda 47. The media likes to talk about Project 2025, which has nothing to do with our campaign. It is Agenda 47.”

Trump’s pick to serve as “Border Czar,” Tom Homan — an anti-immigration headliner known for his role in pushing the family separation policies in Trump’s first term — is credited as a contributor in the project’s text.

According to the president-elect, Homan will be tasked with helping carry out the policies Miller had masterminded. The new “Border Czar” has already suggested the controversies of his last stint in government by simply deporting entire families together.

So far, two other Trump picks are directly mentioned in Project 2025’s author and contributor lists: Brendan Carr and John Ratcliff.

Ratcliffe has been nominated to serve as CIA Director. He is credited as a contributor to Project 2025, and previously served as Trump’s director of national intelligence. In 2023, he was named a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation.

Carr, nominated as Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the proposed reforms to the regulatory body. Carr’s chapter proposes stripping tech platforms of Section 230 immunity — a law that prevents digital companies from being held liable for content posted by their users — banning TikTok, and restricting tech companies ability to curb the proliferation of extremist content under the guise of protecting “free speech.”

Carr has a close relationship with Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of Tesla and X (formerly Twitter) who in effect purchased himself an advisory role with the incoming Trump administration through his campaign activities. Carr publicly bashed the FCC in 2023 after it denied a bid by Musk’s Starlink to provide rural broadband because the company “had not shown that it was reasonably capable of fulfilling [the] requirements to deploy a network of the scope, scale, and size required.” Under Carr, Musk may have secured a lucrative ally for his own communications ventures.

After months of pretending that Trump had nothing to do with Project 2025 — and claiming that Democrats’ warnings about the policy platform were liberal hysterics — the president-elect is now pulling administration officials from the pool of conservatives who worked with the Heritage Foundation.

This trajectory was always obvious, so much so that immediately after his electoral victory, his allies celebrated the fact that they no longer had to lie through their teeth about their desire to enact Project 2025.

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