Conservative Coalition Aims to Fill Federal Bureaucracy with 20,000 Conservatives Under Next Republican Administration

The Heritage Foundation and more than 50 conservative groups hope to fill the next Republican administration with more than 20,000 qualified staffers.

The Heritage Foundation is leading a coalition project, Project 2025, that is part of a $22 million presidential transition operation to compile a personnel list to better aid a potential Republican administration to better staff the federal bureaucracy.

Some new details on what Heritage is doing to recruit for the next Republican admin — and how those efforts dovetail w Trump's. w @maggieNYT https://t.co/ZWL1tyJm96

— Jonathan Swan (@jonathanvswan) April 20, 2023

After former President Donald Trump and conservatives decried the terrible staffing decisions that were made under his administration, Heritage, along with conservative groups such as the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), the Center for Renewing America, FreedomWorks, and many others hope to identify thousands of potential recruits by the end of 2024.

Heritage and the conservative organizations have already spoken to Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), and other presidential candidates about the project.

Trump has decried that his administration was full of “snakes” and “traitors” and that former Trump senior staffers, such as James Bacon, will help the project vet those who are focused on furthering an “America First” agenda.

Trump wants to shred the administrative apparatus that makes up Washington, DC, by using a new employment category known as “Schedule F.” Schedule F would reportedly give the president the power to terminate and replace as many as 50,000 federal bureaucrats and replace them with those who might further a more conservative vision for the federal government.

Everett Kelly, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), referred to the Schedule F idea as the “most profound undermining of the civil service in our lifetimes.”

Paul Dans, the director of Heritage’s Project 2025, spoke to then-Breitbart News and now-Washington Examiner reporter Breccan Thies, about how this project would help further the conservative mission.

“The common themes you begin to realize among all the conservatives is the bureaucracy,” he said. “If there was a central theme in this whole project, it is really to dismantle the administrative state. The administrative state has been co-opted by progressives and liberals and it functions against any incoming conservative president. The faster the party realizes how to work with a bureaucracy, the more effective it will be.”

“Conservatives really need to figure out how to work government to achieve their own values,” Dans added.

John McEntee, the former director of the White House presidential personnel office, said on Breitbart News Saturday in 2022 that a second Trump administration would be focused on hiring the “best group of people.”