Inside the blueprint for the next Republican White House
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When Donald Trump won a surprise victory in the 2016 election, his first major task was to fill thousands of vacancies in the federal government. It took several months to assemble staff and begin to implement the former president’s agenda.
If a Republican wins in 2024, conservatives don’t want the same problem. Project 2025, an initiative of the Heritage Foundation, is quietly assembling a pick-and-place network of potential appointees and policy proposals. They’ve pitched each of the leading Republican candidates on their strategy. The goal? If a Republican wins, to allow the new president to roll out their agenda as seamlessly and as quickly as possible.
“This is the first time the movement has constructively and systematically come together, put down petty differences, and really focused on how we can prepare for the president to hit the ground Day 1,” Paul Dans, the project’s director, said.
The project is organized into four initiatives, or “pillars,” as Dans called them. The first is a conservative policy agenda, by way of the Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership,” a comprehensive policy guidebook the organization has published consecutively since the Reagan administration. In addition, Heritage organized a 180-day policy “playbook” to govern the president’s first half-year in office.
The other two pillars are largely personnel-based. To provide a wide array of potential appointees and hires, Heritage is amassing an online database of conservatives — “akin to a conservative LinkedIn,” Dans told me — many of whom may be a good fit for a Republican administration. The goal, Axios reported, is to eventually recruit around 20,000 people to fill both appointed positions and federal workers. So far, the database has over 5,000 entries.
“It’s almost like a fantasy government, like fantasy football, where you can move names and profiles up into a virtual organization chart,” Dans said.
From there, Heritage is offering an online training course to prepare potential hires to work in a conservative federal government — an “online university,” Dans explained, teaching “how to be an effective political appointee.”
“Conservatives face an uphill battle working in government,” Dans said. “We are typically small-government people. … So we have to reorganize our brains and say, we have to learn the tools of government.”
While Heritage has briefed Trump, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley on their plans, several individuals familiar with the initiative expressed that Trump would be best-suited to implement Heritage’s policy agenda. The makeup of Project 2025’s advisory committee reflects this: John McEntee, one of Trump’s closest White House aides, is a senior adviser, and one of its largest cheerleaders is Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist.
The Trump campaign issued a statement distancing itself from Project 2025 and other initiatives last month. It called the them “certainly appreciated,” but noted that “none of these groups or individuals speak for President Trump or his campaign. We will have an official transition effort to be announced at a later date.”
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Heritage’s efforts bolster a Trump network that was increasingly depleted near the end of the first Trump term. “A number of people from the first Trump administration have been pretty outspoken that they would not serve in a second Trump administration, and that is certainly deeply echoed in private conversations around Washington, D.C.,” said Erik Telford, a senior executive at the Commonwealth Foundation.
Some of Trump’s challengers have used this as a form of attack. At an event in Des Moines, Iowa, this month, DeSantis said Trump “would not be able to recruit enough good personnel to serve in his administration.”
“You can’t do it alone,” DeSantis said. “As the president you can make the vision and make the decisions. (But) you need a cadre of good people who are going to be there and turn the screws on this bureaucracy.”
But Project 2025’s outreach has gone beyond traditional Republican circles. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime Democrat populist running for president as an independent, has a copy of Heritage’s “Mandate for Leadership” on his desk. He attributes his own study of Heritage’s plan as an effort to collect “all of these different points of view about wasteful programs in government that could be eliminated.”
Kennedy denies that he’s had any conversations with Project 2025, but he left the door open: “I’m looking for people from every political party, so I’ll be interested in talking to everybody.”
Dans notes that the project’s genesis dates to 2016, when Trump largely eschewed the Republican establishment en route to a surprise victory in the general election. Upon arriving to the White House, though, the Trump administration faced over 4,000 vacancies that would have traditionally been filled by party operatives, campaign staff or establishment veterans.
“As a result, you had these terrible, terrible situations of holdover appointees who didn’t exactly understand what the game plan in front of them was,” Dans said.
The openings ranged from cabinet positions and White House advisers, to policy experts, assistants and schedulers. For high-level appointees, like ambassadors and cabinet secretaries, a 60-vote confirmation in the Senate is necessary; for other lower-level staff, hiring does not need to be approved or appointed by the president.
“I had a lot of friends who waited six, eight, 10 months, even a year, to serve, but they were willing and ready to serve,” said Jordan Hess, the Utah Republican Party’s former vice chairman who worked at the Heritage Foundation at the time. “That does our country a big disservice.”
Now, by stockpiling a roster of potential government employees, Heritage hopes to minimize delays. But critics have pointed to Heritage’s plan as an effort to fill even traditionally non-partisan roles in the government with staffers loyal to Trump.
In recent months, Trump has reportedly told allies he’d like to use the Justice Department to investigate and punish his political enemies, The Washington Post reported. He has also said he plans to expand his use of executive power, as administrations — including President Joe Biden’s — have done in recent years.
But some conservatives have concerns about Heritage’s efforts. Philip Wallach, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told the Associated Press the project involves some “fantasizing” about what a president can do in office. “Some of these visions, they do start to just bleed into some kind of authoritarian fantasies where the president won the election, so he’s in charge, so everyone has to do what he says — and that’s just not the system the government we live under,” he said.
Part of the initiative includes reinstating “Schedule F,” a Trump-era executive order that would more easily allow Trump to lay off thousands of civil workers and replace with them political allies. Heritage is undergoing a massive effort to screen applicants’ social media accounts to make sure they’re sufficiently aligned with the Trump agenda, Axios reports.
The application to be included in the “personnel database” asks a series of ideological questions, like whether the U.S. should “select immigrants based on country of origin” or whether the United Nations “should have authority over the citizens ... of sovereign nations.”
The effort appears to pre-staff a federal government capable of allowing Trump — or whoever the Republican nominee is — to move forward with his agenda the moment he takes office. Biden signed over 30 executive orders in his first week, a record; Trump seems intent on going even further, claiming he might set up a “tiny little desk” on the Capitol steps during the inauguration so he can sign “four or five” executive orders that day.
“I’m not going to wait to get to work,” Trump told an Iowa crowd last month.
Dans seems to share the same vision. “We struggle to find anything positive about Joe Biden,” Dans said. “But I would say that his team, if nothing else, did come in prepared to go to work day one. We’re going to reverse-engineer a little bit of what they did, and take it to a new level.”
