President-elect Donald Trump and his allies disavowed the conservative Project 2025 during the election, seeing the conservative transition plan and policy blueprint as a liability after Democrats used it to attack his campaign. Some close to Trump even suggested those tied to the effort would be shut out of a potential administration.
“They made themselves nuclear,” Howard Lutnick, the co-chair of Trump’s transition and his nominee to serve as Commerce Secretary, told CNBC in September.
But with the campaign over, Trump’s transition team is turning to Project 2025 to help staff the next administration.
Already, transition officials are taking suggestions for potential hires from the extensive personnel database created by Project 2025, a person familiar with the situation told NBC News.
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While Project 2025’s massive book of conservative policy recommendations received most of the attention from Democrats, a central part of the effort was putting together a database that officials had framed as a conservative LinkedIn to help staff an incoming Republican administration.
The person familiar with the transition said officials overseeing plans for some departments and agencies have started to reach out to potential hires whose names and contact information were part of that database.
Individuals helping fill out the personnel teams for the Trump transition operation have sought and used information from the Project 2025 database because of the enormity of the task of filling out the more than 4,000 political appointee jobs that will become vacant in 2025, this person said.
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“There’s a lot of positions to fill and we continue to send names over, including ones from the database as they are conservative, qualified and vetted,” the person, who worked on Project 2025, said. “Hard to find 4,000 solid people so we are happy to help.”
The receptiveness to using the Project 2025 database for potential hires comes as the transition has already shown it is open to tapping contributors to the effort for administration jobs, including Tom Homan as border czar, Brendan Carr as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and John Ratcliffe as CIA director. Both Homan and Ratcliffe were listed as contributors to Project 2025, while Carr authored a chapter on the FCC.
Additionally, former Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, a Project 2025 author who also served as the Republican National Committee’s platform policy director, is thought of as a potential administration pick too.
But not everyone is being welcomed aboard. Politico reported Thursday that the transition rejected a push for former Trump administration official Roger Severino, who authored Project 2025’s chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services, to serve as deputy secretary of the agency, over concerns about the anti-abortion policies he laid out in the policy blueprint.
The personnel database was a cornerstone of Project 2025. Under Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official who led Project 2025, the group built a database of more than 10,000 candidates vetted for their MAGA credentials who sought to build out the administration in the event Trump won, as ProPublica reported in August. The idea behind the effort was to ensure that a future Trump administration would have the foot soldiers necessary to rapidly enact his agenda upon taking office.
But as tensions grew between the Trump campaign and Project 2025 — which culminated with Trump repeatedly lambasting and disavowing the effort — officials said they would not consult the database for potential hires. In his September interview with CNBC, Lutnick said he “won’t take a list from” Project 2025.
“The transition team of Donald Trump has not touched it, has not gone near it,” he said. “And anybody who says it’s got anything to do with us is just not telling the truth on purpose. Because I am clear, clear, clear. Zero.”
Lutnick reiterated his point to the New York Post before last month’s vice presidential debate, calling Project 2025 “radioactive.”
That wasn’t the first time team Trump took aim at the Project 2025 personnel database. In July, a top Trump campaign adviser told Semafor: “If you’re an organization that is purporting to be pushing ‘Trump policies,’ it’s probably the last organization that we’ll take references from for personnel.”
But a Republican operative who spoke with NBC News shortly after Trump’s electoral victory said “it’s kind of bulls--- if they really try to keep all those dudes out.”
“I think it would be a big mistake,” this person said. “There’s a lot of people with their name in Project 2025. That’s going to be a tough one to really stick by. I think they’ll make an example of a few people. Hopefully some of them will be able to make it through.”
Asked about the transition using the Project 2025 database, a Trump transition official said: “The transition is working to ensure great people are in position to deliver the promises made through President Trump’s common sense agenda and overwhelming victory on Election Day.”
Project 2025 played a huge role in Democratic campaign advertising and in the party’s anti-Trump message during both President Joe Biden’s and Vice President Kamala Harris’ bids, sparking Trump and his allies to ratchet up their condemnations and claim the policy agenda was not Trump’s.
There was plenty of overlap between the Trump agenda and Project 2025 — which featured contributions from dozens of officials from Trump’s first administration. For instance, the Project 2025 policy blueprint and Trump’s “Agenda 47” featured similar ideas on mass deportations and slashing the federal bureaucracy.
There were some differences, though, as Project 2025 included calls for banning pornography and dismantling the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It also featured stringent anti-abortion rights policies that clashed with Trump’s abortion message during the campaign.
At a July campaign event in Grand Rapids, Trump said people on “the severe right came up with this Project 2025.”
“Very, very conservative,” he said. “Sort of the opposite of the radical left. You have the radical left and the radical right. They came up with this. I don’t know what it is. … Then you read some of these things and they are seriously extreme. But I don’t know anything about it. I don’t want to know anything about it.”
A September NBC News poll found that 57% of registered voters viewed Project 2025 negatively while just 4% said they viewed the effort positively.
But even over the summer, Project 2025 insiders weren’t sweating Trump and his campaign’s disavowals, viewing them as an effort to boost his electoral chances, not to flatly reject the ideas and people tied to the effort.
Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who railed against Project 2025 with a very large copy of the policy book at the Democratic National Convention in August, said Democrats need to focus on their policy response to the elevation of Project 2025’s officials and ideas. She shared an Instagram post in which she promoted new legislation tightening restrictions around the collection and management of reproductive health data.
“It’s easy to say ‘we told you so,’ but more importantly, we now know what they’re going to do, so it’s on Democrats to decide how to fight back,” McMorrow said. “Which is exactly what I’m doing.”
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