The Trump Administration Personnel With Ties To Project 2025

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Dec 21, 2025, 8:53 AM

the trump administration personnel with ties to project 2025

Molly Butler/Media Matters | Trump photo: Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons The following figures have been picked for positions in Trump's second term Written by Sophie Lawton, Madeline Peltz & John Knefel Though President-elect Donald Trump tried throughout the 2024 campaign to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation-led initiative Project 2025 -- a sprawling right-wing plan to remake the federal government in the MAGA mold --... This is no surprise. Eighteen of the writers and editors of Project 2025’s opus, Mandate for Leadership, served in the first Trump administration.

Twelve more worked both in the administration and for one of the Trump campaign or transition teams. Of the 267 total contributors to the Project 2025 efforts, 144 worked in the first Trump administration or in his campaign or transition teams. Trump has nominated several Project 2025 contributors to his team. President-elect Donald Trump distanced himself from Project 2025 on the campaign trail but has since nominated several authors or contributors from the controversial conservative presidential wish list to his administration. Trump called the Project 2025 policy proposals -- which include restrictions on abortion pills, birth control pills and Medicare access, as well as eliminating a couple of federal agencies -- "extreme, seriously extreme" in... "I don't know anything about it.

I don't want to know anything about it," he previously said, despite having many connections to its authors and contributors. Democrats pounced on Trump for Project 2025 during the election season, calling it a warning of what is to come under a second Trump term. Find this story in your account’s ‘Saved for Later’ section. During his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump and aides repeatedly dismissed the idea of any association between them and Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation effort to draft a transition plan and detailed policy blueprint... At least 140 members of the first Trump administration helped with the plan, and multiple former Trump Cabinet members wrote much of Project 2025’s 922-page Mandate for Leadership manifesto — including top Trump adviser... Now that Trump and Team MAGA are headed back to the White House, they clearly aren’t keeping their distance anymore.

Trump has named several Project 2025 authors and contributors to his White House Cabinet, and despite the fact that Trump transition co-chair Howard Lutnick vowed in September that “I won’t take a list from... Below is an updating list of everyone with ties to Project 2025 who is currently set to serve in the second Trump administration. Trump has named Brendan Carr, the senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, as the next FCC chair. Carr authored the FCC chapter of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, which argues the agency should prioritize “reining in Big Tech, promoting national security, unleashing economic prosperity, and ensuring FCC accountability and good governance.”... It also calls for adopting a more hawkish FCC approach to foreign adversaries, such as China, like banning TikTok on national-security grounds. And Carr writes that the FCC should make it easier for Elon Musk’s Starlink and other space companies to launch more communication satellites.

Pete Hoekstra is former representative and current Michigan Republican Party chairman who served as U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands during the first Trump administration. Trump has nominated him to be the next U.S. ambassador to Canada. Hoekstra is listed as a contributor to Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership. It’s not clear how he contributed, but the Department of Education chapter cites a critical report he authored in Congress on the Department.

In 2011, Hoekstra was also named a visiting distinguished fellow with the Heritage Foundation where he focused on education reform. Trump distanced himself from Project 2025 during his campaign. Now he’s tapped several people tied to the controversial manifesto to serve in his administration. Donald Trump listens while Russell Vought speaks during an executive order signing regarding federal regulations in the Roosevelt Room of the White House Oct. 9, 2019, in DC. When news first broke this summer about Project 2025, the conservative mandate for reshaping the federal government, then-candidate Donald Trump immediately distanced himself from the plan, calling some of it “ridiculous and abysmal.”

Fast forward several months, and Trump, now the president-elect, has announced his intention to place several architects of the plan into top positions in his administration. Project 2025 is a 900-page “presidential transition” plan that consists of a playbook for the first 180 days in office. A coalition of conservative groups organized by The Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank, developed the plan to “rescue the country.” Some of its more controversial elements include elimination of government agencies, boosting the... WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump has chosen several people who helped craft the controversial Project 2025 for key roles in his second administration, despite his repeated criticisms on the campaign trail of the conservative... In the more than two weeks since the 2024 race was called for Trump, the president-elect has tapped at least five people who wrote portions of or contributed to the project to positions in... The involvement in the project of those he has selected ranges from authors of full sections to people simply listed as contributors.

Brendan Carr, the senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission who Trump announced this week as his pick to chair the agency next year, wrote Project 2025's full chapter focused on the FCC. Trump’s choices for CIA director, John Ratcliffe; ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra; and “border czar," Tom Homan, are all listed in the project as contributors, which the text of the project describes as those... Russell Vought, one of the chief architects of Project 2025 — a conservative blueprint for the next presidency — is no fan of the federal government that President-elect Donald Trump will soon lead. He believes “woke” civil servants and “so-called expert authorities” wield illegitimate power to block conservative White House directives from deep within federal agencies, and wants Trump to “bend or break” that bureaucracy to his... Vought is a vocal proponent of a plan known as Schedule F, under which Trump would fire thousands of career civil servants with extensive experience in their fields and replace them with his own... Both are core tenets of Project 2025.

Throughout his campaign, Trump adamantly disavowed Project 2025, even though its policies overlapped with his and some of its authors worked in his first administration. He castigated anyone who suggested the blueprint, which polls showed was deeply unpopular among voters, represented his aims for the presidency. But last week, the president-elect nominated Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget, which oversees the White House budget and its policy agenda across the federal government. This report demonstrates how closely associated Trump is with Project 2025 by listing the author of every chapter of the project’s PDF document and naming the specific association with Trump in some formal capacity,... Part of his current or first campaign team Part of his current or first transition team

Part of his current or first administration Of the document’s forty-five or so authors and/or editors, only seven have no known direct association with Trump. I’ve named the specific association of each author with Trump in a list below. Trump spent his presidential campaign running from Project 2025. Now, he’s using it to stock his White House and administration. He has tapped nearly a half-dozen Project 2025 authors and contributors, including Brendan Carr, who Trump picked this week to lead the FCC; former Rep.

Pete Hoekstra, who got the nod for ambassador to Canada; and John Ratcliffe, who was tapped for director of the CIA and Tom Homan as “border czar”. - Politico Use this handy visual guide to track the dozens of people who worked in the Trump administration and are authoring Project 2025. Who are the Opus Dei members involved in this scheme to replace American democracy with an extremist Christian theocracy? Where does the Heritage Foundation get its funding? What are Putin and Orban involved with Trump's Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation?

(Shoutout to Andra Watkins who writes the wonderful How Project 2025 Will Ruin YOUR Life Substack for her research on this topic). Andra Watkins who writes the Substack newsletter "How Project 2025 Will Ruin Your Life" and a team of volunteers has compiled a list of 250 contributors to Project 2025. The list reveals connections to Republican politicians, Republican donors, and Republican judges and justices. Project 2025 is fully embedded within the Republican Party and its partisan enablers. They aim to saddle Americans with their fascism, their gaslighting, their weaponized Christianity, and their relentless pursuit of power long after 45 is gone. - Andra Watkins

DemLabs has converted Andra's list into an app to make it easy to search and use. There are two tabs for people and groups. Your support allows Common Dreams to continue covering the stories and amplifying the voices that the corporate media never will. Make a tax-deductible year-end gift to ensure we can sustain the reporting needed to meet the challenges of 2026. People protest the Trump administration, Elon Musk, and Project 2025 at a Tesla dealership in suburban Baltimore on March 29, 2025. "Project 2025 isn't just influential in Washington.

Its friends and creators are literally running the show." Despite repeatedly attempting to distance himself from Project 2025 during his reelection campaign, U.S. President Donald Trump's administration employs dozens of senior officials with links to the Heritage Foundation-led plan to expand executive power and shrink the federal government—including a majority of his Cabinet. That's according to an interactive analysis published Monday by the international climate-focused news outlet DeSmog, which found that more than 50 high-level Trump administration officials have ties to groups behind Project 2025.

The Trump Administration Personnel With Ties To Project 2025

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