President-elect Donald Trump defended nominating people with ties to right-wing policy agenda Project 2025 to his administration in an interview with TIME published Thursday—even as he continued to criticize the controversial plan—as Project 2025 contributors are slated to serve in top roles overseeing the federal budget, trade, State Department and more.
US President Donald Trump gives a speech at the Heritage Foundation's President's Club Meeting in ... [+]
Trump has named several administration picks who have ties to Project 2025, an agenda crafted by the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups that proposes a total overhaul of the executive branch in a second Trump administration, even as he has publicly denounced the project.
The president-elect defended those picks to TIME when asked about hiring people affiliated with the policy map, saying, “If we had a few people that were involved, they had hundreds of them” and noting Project 2025, which has dozens of contributors behind it, is a “big document.”
Russell Vought: Trump has nominated Vought to lead the Office of Managment and Budget—his previous role in Trump’s first term—after Vought authored Project 2025’s chapter on the Executive Office of the President of the United States and reportedly spearheaded the project’s playbook for Trump’s first 180 days, with secret camera footage published by the Centre for Climate Reporting showing him claiming Trump had “blessed” the project and is “very supportive of what we do.”
Peter Navarro: Trump’s former trade advisor—who recently got out of prison for being held in contempt—has now been named to serve as senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, after Navarro authored a Project 2025 chapter on “the case for fair trade” that advocated for more restrictions on trade like the tariffs Trump has already proposed.
Paul Atkins: Trump’s pick to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission is listed as a contributor to Project 2025’s section on Federal Regulatory Agencies, which calls for broad reforms at the SEC that gets rid of regulations that the authors believe are “impediments” to companies’ success and opposing social justice, sustainability, diversity and other similar campaigns in the business world.
Brendan Carr: Trump’s nominee to chair the Federal Communications Commission, who already serves there as one of five lower-ranking commissioners, authored Project 2025’s chapter on the FCC, in which he proposed reining in big tech and putting a bigger focus on national security—including making it easier to hold social media companies liable for content on their platforms and banning TikTok (a move Trump doesn’t support).
Tom Homan: Trump’s proposed “border czar” will return to the Trump administration after previously serving as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and is listed as a contributor to Project 2025 and a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, authoring a number of articles for the organization on immigration policy.
John Ratcliffe: Trump named Ratcliffe as CIA director after the official previously served as Trump’s director of national intelligence; he’s credited as a contributor to Project 2025, with the agenda’s chapter on the intelligence community citing an interview with Ratcliffe about working in the first administration.
Monica Crowley: Crowley served as assistant secretary of the Treasury during Trump’s first term and contributed to Project 2025’s section on the Treasury Department, though Trump has now tapped her as assistant secretary of state, saying her role will include serving as the administration’s representative for events like the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028.
Michael Anton: Trump picked Anton to be director of policy planning at the State Department, after Anton—formerly the spokesperson at the National Security Council—was listed as a contributor to Project 2025’s chapter on the Executive Office of the President.
Project 2025’s website also previously listed America First Legal, an organization run by incoming Trump policy chief Stephen Miller, as one of the groups involved with the project, but the group later removed its name from Project 2025’s website after Trump started criticizing the effort, and Miller denied having any affiliation with it in a July statement to ABC.
In addition to its policy agenda, Project 2025 also compiled a LinkedIn-style database for prospective conservative staffers, which NBC News reports the Trump transition team is using to identify staff for the incoming administration despite Trump’s public opposition to Project 2025.
Trump was named as TIME’s Person of the Year on Thursday. His comments on Project 2025 were part of a broader interview about his election and impending presidency. Trump told the publication he believed it was “totally inappropriate” and “foolish” for Project 2025’s policy agenda to be released ahead of the election, saying, “They complicated my election by doing it because people tried to tie me and I didn't agree with everything in there, and some things I vehemently disagreed with.” When asked if he had expressed his frustrations to the team behind Project 2025, Trump responded, “Oh I did.”
Trump’s incoming Vice President JD Vance, while not credited as an author on Project 2025, has numerous ties to the Heritage Foundation that have raised scrutiny since he became Trump’s running mate. Heritage Foundation founder Kevin Roberts told reporters the organization was “rooting” for the Ohio senator to be named as Trump’s VP pick, after telling Politico in March that Vance “is absolutely going to be one of the leaders—if not the leader—of our movement.” Vance also authored the introduction to a 2017 report by the Heritage Foundation and the introduction to Roberts’ book, in which he praised the Heritage Foundation as “the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.” The incoming vice president has not endorsed Project 2025 and has disavowed it having any connection to Trump himself, saying before he was named as Trump’s running mate that he believed the agenda had “some good ideas” but there were others he “disagrees” with.
Trump is appointing people linked to Project 2025 despite transition team co-chair Howard Lutnick vowing ahead of the election to “blacklist” anyone involved with the project from serving in the administration. “Heritage, because of Project 2025, is radioactive,” Lutnick told The New York Post before the vice presidential debate in October. “As in, none, zero, radioactive. So that’s a clear position.” The Trump transition team has not yet commented on its appointees’ ties to Project 2025.
The Trump transition team could name even more people to the administration that have Project 2025 ties. Gene Hamilton, who authored Project 2025’s chapter on the Justice Department, is reportedly being considered for a legal role within the agency, ABC News reported in November. His chapter calls for a “top-to-bottom overhaul” of the DOJ and decries the agency’s “radical Left ideologues who have embedded themselves throughout its offices and components,” with proposals that include ending FBI efforts to combat misinformation, eliminating FBI offices, enforcing the death penalty and ensuring the DOJ acts more in line with Trump’s policies and conservative agenda. Trump officials are also reportedly considering appointing Reed Rubinstein as general counsel for the Treasury Department, who is affiliated with Trump adviser Miller’s America First Legal organization and formerly served as deputy associate attorney general, general counsel for the Education Department, and as senior adviser to the treasury secretary. Rubinstein is listed as a contributor to Project 2025 and is credited as helping with the agenda’s chapter on the State Department.
Project 2025 proposes a sweeping overhaul of the executive branch, including eliminating some agencies entirely—like the Departments of Education and Homeland Security—and broadly replacing career civil servants with political appointees. The agenda makes a number of recommendations that are broadly in line with policies Trump has already proposed, such as eliminating climate change and transgender rights efforts, barring the teaching of “critical race theory” and pulling out of international organizations that don’t serve the administration’s interests. It also goes beyond Trump’s proposals, with calls to outlaw pornography, abolish all student loan forgiveness, impose baseline tax rates and overhaul the Federal Reserve through methods like taking away the government’s control over the nation’s money or returning to the gold standard. It also proposes banning TikTok and restricting abortion nationally by stripping federal approval for abortion drug mifepristone and using the Comstock Act to ban the mailing of abortion pills, which conflicts with Trump expressing support for TikTok and claiming he would leave abortion to the states.
Trump disavowed Project 2025 and denied having any connection to it during the election, though he has a number of ties to the Heritage Foundation beyond the people he’s hiring for his next administration. Trump has praised the Heritage Foundation’s work in the past, and the organization has boasted that Trump followed many of its policy recommendations during his first presidential term. It remains to be seen if he will adopt any of Project 2025’s proposals that are different from the ones he’s already proposed himself, and he declined to specify that in his interview with TIME, noting only that the agenda “had some pretty ridiculous things in there” but “also had some very good things in there.” The Trump transition team and Heritage Foundation have also not yet commented on whether Trump intends to follow Project 2025’s playbook for his first 180 days in office. Unlike the organization’s broader policy agenda, this playbook has not been publicly released, with Vought saying in the Centre for Climate Reporting’s secret footage that the information in it is “closely held” and he believed it would be possible to get it to Trump should he win the election.
While Project 2025 has garnered more publicity, multiple outlets report a different right-wing organization, America First Policy Institute, is actually driving Trump’s policy agenda. That organization is chaired by Linda McMahon, also the co-chair of Trump’s formal transition team, and includes numerous former Trump officials, including Ratcliffe, former adviser Kellyanne Conway and former acting Homeland Security director Chad Wolf. The policy organization, which has reportedly been crafting executive orders for Trump, pushes a conservative policy agenda but is less extreme than Project 2025, and does not call for banning abortion entirely or eliminating federal agencies.
Project 2025’s policy agenda initially came out last year, part of what the Heritage Foundation has said is a long tradition of crafting policy recommendations for incoming Republican presidents that dates back to Ronald Reagan. Project 2025 gained attention earlier this year as Democrats repeatedly highlighted it during the election as a key reason to oppose Trump, emphasizing its extreme policies and tying Trump to the agenda. Trump publicly opposed the agenda as it gained notoriety, claiming in July he has “nothing to do with them,” has “no idea” who’s behind the plan and finds some of its ideas “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” His campaign adviser Chris LaCivita also denounced it, calling the effort a “pain in the ass,” before Lutnick claimed he would blacklist its members from the next administration.