Trump Selects Project 2025 Architect Russell Vought For Key Role: A Look At His Team’s Ties To The Initiative

 President-elect Donald Trump on Friday named Project 2025 architect Russell Vought as his pick for director of the Office of Management and Budget, after Trump already named several people involved with the right-wing policy agenda to serve in his next White House—despite disavowing it before the election.

If confirmed by the Senate, Vought will return to his role in Trump’s first administration, tasked with assisting the president with the federal budget.

Vought authored Project 2025’s chapter on the Executive Office of the President of the United States and also 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.”

His nomination comes after Trump already 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.

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.

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.

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.

In addition to Vought, the Trump transition team is considering naming several other people with Project 2025 ties to the administration, ABC reports. Gene Hamilton, who authored Project 2025’s chapter on the Justice Department, is reportedly being considered for a legal role within the agency. 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.

Will Trump Follow Project 2025?

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 now 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 ultimately 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. 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.