If a Republican enters the Oval Office in 2025, whether it’s Donald J. Trump or someone else, there is a good chance that president will turn to the same electronic database to staff the White House and federal agencies.
Think of it as a right-wing LinkedIn. This so-called Project 2025 — part of a $22 million presidential transition operation at a scale never attempted before in conservative politics — is being led by the Heritage Foundation, a group that has been staffing Republican administrations since the Reagan era.
Heritage usually compiles its own personnel lists, and spends far less doing so. But for this election, after conservatives and Mr. Trump himself decried what they viewed as terrible staffing decisions made during his administration, more than 50 conservative groups have temporarily set aside rivalries to team up with Heritage on the project, set to start Friday.
They have already identified several thousand potential recruits and have set a goal of having up to 20,000 potential administration officials in their database by the end of 2024, according to Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage. Heritage has contracted the technology company Oracle to build a secure personnel database, Dr. Roberts said.
“In 2016, the conservative movement was not prepared to flood the zone with conservative personnel,” Dr. Roberts said. “On Jan. 20, 2025, things will be very different. This database will prepare an army of vetted, trained staff to begin dismantling the administrative state from Day 1.”
Heritage and its project partners have already briefed Mr. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and their teams, Dr. Roberts said, as well as staff members for other current and potential candidates, including Nikki Haley, the former ambassador to the United Nations; the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy; and former Vice President Mike Pence. They plan to give private briefings to all conservative candidates.
The glaring problem with such an effort is that the various Republican hopefuls would most likely use different staffing criteria. Mr. Trump, the clear front-runner, cares far more about personal loyalty than ideological convictions.
Indeed, he spent the bulk of his presidency trying to root out people whom he perceived as aligned with political critics, such as the Bush family, or Obama administration officials.
In meetings at Mar-a-Lago over the past two years, Mr. Trump has repeatedly complained that his first administration was full of “snakes” and “traitors.” Those he complains about the most are not career bureaucrats but instead people like William P. Barr, a former Barry Goldwater supporter whom Mr. Trump himself selected as his attorney general.
Dr. Roberts has anticipated the Trump challenge — and, though he doesn’t advertise it this way, he has built his project around it. The key people involved with the Heritage-led database served in the former president’s administration. They include James Bacon, a Trump loyalist who worked in the White House Office of Presidential Personnel under one of Mr. Trump’s most trusted aides, John McEntee. In the final year of the Trump administration, Mr. Bacon helped Mr. McEntee overhaul the government’s hiring process. They developed a questionnaire to vet government employees’ loyalty to Mr. Trump and his “America First” agenda.
Typically, a new president is allowed to replace around 4,000 “political appointees” — a revolving layer that sits atop the federal work force. Below the political layer lies a long-term work force of more than two million, who have strong employment protections meant to make it harder for a new president of a different political party to fire them. These protections, enshrined in law, established a civil service that is supposed to be apolitical — with federal officials accumulating subject matter and institutional expertise over long careers in the service of both Republican and Democratic presidents.
Mr. Trump wants to demolish that career civil service — or what he pejoratively calls “the deep state.” He has privately told allies that if he gets back into power he plans to fire far more than the 4,000 government officials that presidents are typically allowed to replace. Mr. Trump’s lawyers already have the legal instrument in hand.
In late 2020, Mr. Trump issued an executive order that would establish a new employment category for federal workers, called “Schedule F.” Barely anyone noticed because the order was developed in strict secrecy over more than a year and issued only two weeks before the 2020 election.
The news was lost amid the postelection chaos as Mr. Trump desperately tried to overturn the result.
But key officials involved with the federal civil service immediately grasped the significance of Schedule F and its potential to create a new federal work force in which loyalty to Mr. Trump was the highest criteria, they said. Everett Kelley, who as national president of the American Federation of Government Employees represents more than half a million government workers, described Schedule F, at the time it was released, as “the most profound undermining of the civil service in our lifetimes.”
Mr. Trump’s staff estimated that Schedule F would give the president the power to terminate and replace as many as 50,000 career government officials who served in roles that influenced federal policy.
President Biden rescinded the Schedule F order on his third day in office, but over the past two years, several of Mr. Trump’s confidants, including his former budget director Russell T. Vought, have been working on a plan to re-enact the order and gut the federal civil service in a second Trump administration.
Now, the two plans — Mr. Trump’s and Heritage’s — are dovetailing, even as Mr. Trump himself has shown no interest in the details. Conveniently, Dennis Kirk, a former Trump administration lawyer who was involved with the adoption of Schedule F, is now employed by Heritage. Mr. Kirk is busy at work on Project 2025, Dr. Roberts said.
