The Trump transition team is reportedly drawing from a list of people vetted by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to help staff the incoming administration.
The conservative think tank has put together a database of thousands of potential candidates from which to draw.
“Individuals helping to fill out the personnel teams for the Trump transition operation have sought and used information from the Project 2025 database because of the enormity of the task of filling out the more than 4,000 political appointee jobs that will become vacant in 2025,” a source told NBC News.
Additionally, a person who worked on Project 2025 informed the news outlet, “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.”
“Hard to find 4,000 solid people, so we are happy to help,” the person added.
Trump transition co-chair Howard Lutnick told CNBC in September regarding Project 2025, “I won’t take a list from them. I won’t take a topic from them. I won’t touch them. They made themselves nuclear.”
However, he noted that he had read the plan.
Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris, sought to tie Trump directly with all the hundreds of pages of policy proposals found in Project 2025, particularly those regarding abortion.
Project 2025 called for better tracking of abortions across the country and requiring chemical abortion drugs to go through a reapproval process by the Food and Drug Administration among other proposals.
President-elect Donald Trump took a more federal government hands-off view regarding abortion during the campaign, saying the matter should be left with the states.
At multiple points in the months leading up to Election Day, Trump disavowed Project 2025 overall.
In early November, he said, “Project 2025. I’ve never read it, and I don’t want to read it, because that way I can be honest with you.”
“Some people got together. I assume they’re extremely conservative, and that’s OK. And they came up with a plan,” Trump added, acknowledging that some of the document’s authors had previously worked for him.
“PROJECT 2025, I’VE NEVER READ IT, AND I DON’T WANT TO READ IT!” – President @RealDonaldTrump pic.twitter.com/RbnuWLNbBy
— Real America’s Voice (RAV) (@RealAmVoice) November 3, 2024
Trump, in fact, has already named some of the authors of Project 2025 to his new administration, including Russell Vought, his former and incoming director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought wrote the chapter on the Executive Office of the President for Project 2025.
The president-elect has also nominated Brendan Carr, who wrote a chapter on the Federal Communications Commission, to be the chairman of the agency.
Project 2025 is 30 chapters long filled with policy recommendations for all the federal government’s major departments and agencies.
Other contributors to the document include Tom Homan, Trump’s incoming border czar, and John Ratcliffe, the CIA director nominee.
As a huge Trump fan, I am sorry that the 2025 gang is back in the tent.
How do you know this news article is true?
He is surrounding (and insulating) himself with reliable conservative voices. I think he learned a great deal from 2016 by trying to be too accommodating. I think the gloves will be off this term. I’ll be happy to see that.
Look Trump said he isn’t using this 2025 project he is using his own wits. Just like he said there are a group of people that got together and put this together and some are from his former cabinet and that is fine but he isn’t even going to read or entertain it. People need to stop putting words into Trumps mouth and stop trying put out thoughts and actions that don’t exist. The guy isn’t even in office yet and we having seen anything yet! These people want to write about what he is going to do when nothing has even been done or even said by Trump.