After Democrats attacked his campaign, President-elect Donald Trump and his allies disavowed the conservative Project 2025 during the election, viewing the conservative transition plan and policy blueprint as a problem. Some close to Trump even implied that anybody involved in the attempt would not be allowed to serve in a future government.
The co-chair of Trump’s transition and his choice to be Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, told CNBC in September that they had made themselves nuclear.
However, Trump’s transition team is looking to Project 2025 to assist in staffing the incoming administration now that the campaign is over.
According to an individual with knowledge of the matter who spoke to NBC News, transition officials are already soliciting recommendations for possible hiring from the vast personnel database established by Project 2025.
A major component of Project 2025 was creating a database that officials had described as a conservative LinkedIn to assist in staffing a prospective Republican administration, even though Democrats focused much of their attention on the project’s enormous volume of conservative policy proposals.
Officials in charge of preparations for some departments and agencies have begun contacting prospective candidates whose names and contact details were included in the database, according to the person with knowledge of the transition.
According to this source, the magnitude of the work of filling out the more than 4,000 political appointee positions that will become open in 2025 has led those assisting in the Trump transition operation’s personnel teams to look for and use information from the Project 2025 database.
The person who worked on Project 2025 stated, “There are a lot of positions to fill and we continue to send names over, including ones from the database because they are conservative, qualified, and vetted.” Finding 4,000 good people is difficult, therefore we are glad to assist.
The willingness to use the Project 2025 database to find possible hires comes after the transition has already demonstrated that it is willing to use those who have contributed to the effort for administration positions, such as John Ratcliffe as CIA director, Brendan Carr as Federal Communications Commission chairman, and Tom Homan as border czar. Carr wrote a chapter on the FCC, and Homan and Ratcliffe were also recognized as collaborators to Project 2025.
Another candidate for the administration is Russ Vought, a former director of the Office of Management and Budget, creator of Project 2025, and former director of the platform policy for the Republican National Committee.
However, not everyone is being accepted.Concerned about the anti-abortion policies outlined in the policy blueprint, Politico reported Thursday that the transition rejected a push for Roger Severino, a former Trump administration official and author of Project 2025’s chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services, to be appointed deputy secretary of the agency.
A key component of Project 2025 was the personnel database. As ProPublica revealed in August, Project 2025, overseen by Paul Dans, a former official in the Trump administration, created a database of over 10,000 candidates who were screened for their MAGA credentials and aimed to expand the administration should Trump win. The goal of the endeavor was to guarantee that a future Trump government would have the foot soldiers required to quickly implement his program whenever it came to power.
However, authorities declared they would not search the database for possible recruitment as tensions between the Trump campaign and Project 2025 increased, culminating in Trump publicly criticizing and rejecting the initiative. Lutnick stated in his September interview with CNBC that he would not accept a list from Project 2025.
He claimed that Donald Trump’s transition team had not approached it or touched it. And anyone who claims that it has anything to do with us is purposefully lying. I am clear because I am clear. Nothing.
Before the vice presidential debate last month, Lutnick called Project 2025 “radioactive” and restated his position to the New York Post.
Team Trump had already targeted the Project 2025 personnel database. “If you’re an organization that is claiming to be pushing Trump policies, it’s probably the last organization that we’ll take references from for personnel,” a senior Trump campaign adviser told Segafor in July.
However, if they truly try to keep all those guys out, a Republican operative told NBC News shortly after Trump’s election victory that it’s kind of bulls—.
This individual remarked, “I think it would be a big mistake.” Many people have their names in Project 2025. That will be difficult to truly adhere to. I believe they will use a few people as examples. We can only hope that some of them will survive.
The transition is striving to make sure excellent individuals are in position to meet the promises made through President Trump’s common sense agenda and landslide victory on Election Day, according to a Trump transition official who was questioned about the transition using the Project 2025 database.
During both President Joe Biden’s and Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaigns, Project 2025 was a major component of Democratic campaign advertising and the party’s anti-Trump messaging. This caused Trump and his supporters to intensify their criticisms and assert that the policy agenda was not his.
The Trump agenda and Project 2025, which included contributions from dozens of Trump first-administration officials, have a lot in common. For example, Trump’s Agenda 47 and the Project 2025 policy framework shared similar views on cutting the federal bureaucracy and mass deportations.
However, there were significant distinctions because Project 2025 called for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to be dismantled and pornography to be banned. Additionally, it had strict anti-abortion rights laws that ran counter to Trump’s campaign rhetoric on abortion.
During a Grand Rapids campaign rally in July, Trump claimed that Project 2025 was the brainchild of the far right.
“Very conservative,” he remarked. The radical left’s opposite, in a way. Both the radical left and the radical right are represented. This is what they came up with. I have no idea what it is. When you read some of these things, you realize how severe they are. However, I have no knowledge of it. I have no interest in learning anything about it.
September According to an NBC Newspoll, only 4% of registered voters indicated they had a positive opinion of Project 2025, while 57% said they had a negative opinion.
Project 2025 insiders, however, weren’t worried about Trump and his campaign’s denials even during the summer. They saw them as an attempt to increase his chances of winning the election rather than a categorical rejection of the concepts and individuals involved.
At the Democratic National Convention in August, Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow blasted Project 2025 while holding a huge copy of the policy book. She suggested that Democrats should concentrate on their policy response to the elevation of Project 2025 personnel and ideas. In an Instagram post, she advocated for new laws that would tighten regulations on the gathering and handling of reproductive health data.
Saying “we told you so” is simple, but more significantly, Democrats must choose how to respond now that we know what they’re going to do, McMorrow added. That’s precisely what I am doing.
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