MAGA’s Massive Jobs Program

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of months, you have probably heard of Project 2025. Depicted by Democrats as the terrifying “blueprint” for a Donald Trump dictatorship, and dismissed by the Trump camp as irrelevant, interest in the right-wing initiative has exploded since Trump made a post distancing himself from it earlier this month. 

“I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” said the former president regarding Project 2025, before claiming never to have seen it and to have “no idea who is in charge of it.” 

Trump’s attempt to dissociate himself from Project 2025 was immediately met with incredulity from critics who correctly pointed out the initiative is teeming with Trump loyalists. According to one review, at least 140 former officials in the Trump administration — including six Cabinet members — contributed in some form to the project, which is led by conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation in a broad coalition with more than 100 other conservative organizations. Additionally, more than half of those listed as authors or editors of the organization’s 920-page manifesto, “Mandate for Leadership,” served in the Trump White House. 

Trump’s claim to have “nothing to do” with Project 2025 is dubious at best. At the same time, there’s little reason to doubt that Trump disagrees with some of the policies promoted in the manifesto. The former president distanced himself from the project because he instinctively understands that many of its official proposals — from banning pornography to cracking down further on abortion rights — are legitimately unpopular with the American electorate. He also dislikes the idea of a separate organization being credited as the main purveyor of Trumpism, especially when some of the things inside the group’s program seem genuinely too weird even for Trump. 

In terms of policy, Project 2025 seems better tailored to a Ron DeSantis administration than a second Trump administration. The manifesto was published in April 2023, when the Florida governor was still considered a frontrunner in the GOP primaries, and the Heritage Foundation had closer ties to his campaign than Trump’s. Like DeSantis, “Mandate for Leadership” evinces a strange obsession with what Americans do in the bedroom. In his foreward, Heritage president Kevin Roberts calls on outlawing pornography and registering teachers and librarians who disseminate “transgender ideology” as sex offenders, while railing against “woke bureaucrats” and diversity, equity and inclusion programs. It is a document that was clearly put together in 2022, at the height of the “woke” panic that catapulted DeSantis to national stardom on the right. 

That Trump wants to distance himself from such a document should come as no surprise. The Republican candidate has never been an ideologue and likes to promote himself as a moderate on social issues. This was evident in his successful push to remove a federal abortion ban from the RNC’s 2024 platform. 

What should be understood about Project 2025, however, is that it is not primarily about crafting a policy agenda for the next Republican administration. In fact, the project’s “policy” program takes a back seat to its “personnel” plank. Contrary to most of the media coverage, the 2025 Presidential Transition Project is chiefly a staffing operation — one as consequential as the objectives it will pursue. 

The scope of Project 2025 is breathtaking. It calls for recruiting and training thousands of future members of the next Trump administration, from low-level foot soldiers to senior officials. In the words of the program’s director, Paul Dans, the goal is to put together an “army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.” Importantly, this effort goes well beyond the White House itself, which typically has a staff of around 400 to 500. Indeed, Dans and his colleagues have their sights on the entire federal bureaucracy. The initiative’s leaders have said that they hope to have at least 20,000 résumés in their personnel database by January, which far outnumbers the 4,000 “political appointees” that each new administration is granted upon entering office. The goal is to install Trump loyalists and committed ideologues throughout the federal bureaucracy at every level. 

It is no coincidence that the man chosen to lead Project 2025 also served as White House liaison in the Office of Personnel Management during Trump’s final year in office. The OPM is an independent agency responsible for overseeing the entire workforce in the federal government. This includes recruiting new employees and managing the human resources operations for more than 2 million civil servants (from health insurance to retirement claims). Dans’s most notable achievement at the OPM was hounding the agency’s director, Dale Cabaniss — who had been confirmed by the Senate just months earlier — into resigning as she resisted the White House’s effort to politicize the agency. 

Dans is joined at Project 2025 by other Trump alumni with experience in personnel. This includes John McEntee, who ran the Presidential Personnel Office in Trump’s last year; Spencer Chretien, who served as special assistant to Trump from 2020-2021; and Troup Hemenway, who was associate director of the PPO under McEntee. 

These men have something in common. All of them were deeply involved in the effort to purge top officials during the final chaotic year of the Trump administration. Indeed, Dans was brought on to the OMP by McEntee, who Trump had promoted to lead the personnel division in February. As director of the PPO, which is in charge of hiring and vetting the White House’s 4,000 political appointees, McEntee oversaw what was described by Axios at the time as a “systematic purging or reassigning of those deemed insufficiently supportive of Trump.” Before Trump tapped McEntee to lead the PPO, the 29-year-old had virtually no experience in government, apart from serving as the president’s body man from 2017-2018.  But what he lacked in experience he made up for in fealty. At the time of his hiring, one official observed that McEntee was unqualified for the job, unless it was to “purge Never Trumpers and reward loyalists.” Trump expected no less; within months McEntee became known as his “loyalty cop” as he pushed out officials and installed loyalists in their place, like then-college senior Hemenway. 

Under McEntee’s leadership, the PPO was privately compared to the East German Stasi or the Gestapo by other Trump aides. Now, he is leading the personnel division at Project 2025, helping to recruit and vet the thousands of expected applicants and “facilitate outreach to presidential candidates.”

The 2020 purge began after Trump’s first impeachment trial, and was mostly focused on top officials in the White House. Toward the end of Trump’s term, however, the administration was already planning a much larger purge that would have spanned the entire federal bureaucracy. Just a few weeks before the 2020 election, the administration announced an executive order known as Schedule F that would have stripped civil service protections from tens of thousands, or perhaps hundreds of thousands, of civil servants. This would have empowered the president to fire as many government employees as he and his top officials deemed necessary. In the words of the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Salary Council, Ron Sanders, who resigned in protest after the executive order was issued, Schedule F was a blatant attempt to replace “apolitical expertise with political obeisance.” 

With this history, Project 2025’s effort to recruit at least 20,000 vetted individuals begins to make sense. On this plan to purge the federal bureaucracy, Trump is almost certainly aligned with the initiative. 

If reelected president in November, there is no doubt that Trump will pick up where his administration left off in January 2021. The candidate has promised to reinstate Schedule F on Day One, and has made “destroying the deep state” central to his campaign. It has also been reported that McEntee will probably have a “very senior role” in a second Trump administration. The former president remains fond of McEntee, and says that there is “nobody better” at rooting out traitors and disloyal people inside the federal government. According to Rolling Stone, one source who has discussed McEntee with Trump has said that he will have a similar role in enforcing “MAGA purity” throughout all agencies and departments during a second term. 

This effort will likely be aided by the American Accountability Foundation, a right-wing “opposition research” group that the Heritage Foundation awarded $100,000 in May to help compile information on “anti-American bad actors burrowed into the administrative state.” Before this latest McCarthyist venture, the AAF’s primary activity had been to dig up dirt on Biden nominees and smear them as anti-American communists — or, as its founder told Fox News in 2021, “take a big handful of sand and throw it in the gears of the Biden administration.”

In addition to the efforts by Trump loyalists at Project 2025, another think tank that is said to be even closer to the former president, the America First Policy Institute, put forward its own plan for recruiting and training personnel last October. The AFPI, which has been called a “White House in waiting,” has developed over 30 “action plan teams,” and is working to assemble a “loyal team to take control away from the administrative state on day one.” The mission is largely the same, and before joining McEntee at Project 2025, Hemenway worked as a “senior adviser” for AFPI’s own transition project. 

All of these efforts will go toward the goal of seizing the federal bureaucracy and wielding it against Trump’s opponents. This is not some liberal fever dream; it is what Trump and many allies have said they would do. If there is any previous Republican president who Trump resembles most, it is Richard M. Nixon. Like the 37th president, Trump sees departments and agencies like the Department of Justice, the Pentagon, the FBI and the IRS as powerful tools that can and should be used by the president against his opponents (like Nixon — and now the Supreme Court — Trump also believes that “when the president does it … it is not illegal.”) 

Trump wants to use the organs of government like a bludgeon against his enemies, and most conservative ideologues are more than willing to oblige if it means taking out opponents on the left and “woke” bureaucrats inside the so-called “administration state.” Of course, not all agencies will be weaponized. Some will simply be dismantled or privatized. “A lot of these agencies aren’t going to promote right-wing goals. So it’s not that we even want them to run more efficiently,” admitted McEntee in an interview this year with Kevin Roberts. “Some of the stuff needs to be looked at [and] done away with.” 

On the question of whether there would be a mass exodus of expertise in response to the kind of purge anticipated by the right, McEntee expressed little concern. “If expertise has brought us where we are,” he said, “then we need less experts and more people that are willing to do what’s best for the country.” 

One of the most radical visions for a second Trump administration was laid out back in 2021 by an author and venture capitalist who was then running in the Republican primaries for Ohio’s senate seat. On a far-right “manosphere” podcast, the candidate, J.D. Vance, who would ultimately go on to win his election, opined that Republicans would have to go in “directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.” While sympathetic to calls for “deconstructing” the administrative state, Vance advocated another way: “I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left … and turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.” Comparing the right’s mission to “De-Nazification,” Vance suggested that a second-term Trump should immediately fire “every single mid-level bureaucrat” and “civil servant in the administrative state” and replace them with “our people.”

Three years later, as Trump’s running mate, Vance is closer than ever to helping make that dream a reality.