The Heritage Foundation, along with other conservative groups, has launched Project 2025, an electronic database of potential conservative staffers to join the ranks of an administration if a Republican wins the White House in 2024, the New York Times reported.
Describing the project as “a right-wing LinkedIn,” the New York Times reported that Project 2025 is part of a $22 million operation led by Heritage to staff a Republican administration.
Heritage, which has been staffing Republican administrations since Reagan, has usually compiled its own list of potential personnel. But for the next election, over 50 other conservative groups have teamed up with Heritage to launch Project 2025, prompted in large part by the complaints over former President Trump’s poor staffing decisions during his term in office.
Already, Project 2025 has identified thousands of possible recruits to meet its goal of compiling a list of up to 20,000 potential administration staffers by the end of 2024, according to Heritage president Kevin Roberts.
Roberts told the New York Times that conservatives were not prepared to “flood the zone” with personnel after the 2016 presidential election. But with this new database, an incoming Republican administration will have an “army of vetted, trained staff” at the ready who will be able to dismantle the administrative state starting on January 20, 2025.
The Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025 partners have already informed the Republican presidential candidates and their teams about the new venture and plan to hold private briefings with each of the conservative candidates.
According to the New York Times, while the database sounds good in theory if the incoming Republican president is Donald Trump, Project 2025 may not work since Trump is known to value personal loyalty above competence.
Roberts told the New York Times that he has already anticipated the challenges that come with a possible second Trump term, noting that some of the people involved in Project 2025 formerly served in Trump’s administration.
