POLITICS
Here’s why to worry if you’re on the ‘Conservative LinkedIn’
Right now, Project 2025 is the club nobody wanted to belong to
There’s been a swirl of interest over the last couple last weeks in what the Heritage Foundation’s been up to. The DC think tank, along with a couple dozen other groups, has dubbed its plan “Project 2025” — a conservative manifesto to overtake the federal government — and everyone from the Chris Hayes to John Oliver has taken for granted that this plan is widely accepted in MAGA movement as the plan.
It’s been a reasonable assumption given the lead architects of Project 2025 could last be found working in Trump’s own White House. Russell Vought, Paul Dans, and John McEntee all had the former President’s ear on staffing his administration with tried-and-true loyalists just four years ago.
It then must’ve come as a shock to the insiders when Trump claimed he barely knew who they were or what they’d been up to. Trump’s close adviser Stephen Miller clarified the same this weekend when he too distanced himself from Project 2025.
Even more shocked must be the tens of thousands of eager job seekers who were led to believe Project 2025 was the front door to a job in the next White House. For the last year, Heritage has touted an online staffing portal at which you can upload your resume and answer a couple of questions about your MAGA bonafides. Paul Dans — the director of the project — dubbed this a “Conservative LinkedIn.”
There’s nothing unusual about collecting resumes during a campaign; it happens every time there’s a presidential election. I found as much when I interviewed people involved in personnel planning for the Biden-Harris transition in 2020 for my recent book, Roadblocked. Groups allied with Republicans and Democrats regularly do this in order to help fill the 4,000 or so positions in a new administration.
What makes this different is what Dans also has claimed about the staffing needed to execute Project 2025. Dans has said that they intend to “flood the zone with conservatives” in order to achieve their far-reaching policy ambitions on everything from immigration to abortion to education.
It’s been estimated that to do this Heritage has its sights set on replacing up to 50,000 current federal officials — nearly all stripped of their current civil service job protections — with political allies. Professor Don Moynihan has one of the best write-ups about what this all means at his Substack.
In practice, it has meant signing up at: https://www.project2025.org/personnel/
Please fill out the questionnaire below and upload your resume for inclusion in the Presidential Personnel Database if you would like to be considered for positions in a presidential Administration.
Applicants answer some of the standard hiring questions, but also some novel ones, like “Name one person, past or present, who has most influenced your political philosophy” and “Name one living public policy figure whom you greatly admire and why.” It’s not clear how these questions will be used, but the right answers are pretty obvious.
The site’s been up for a while. I tried to submit my credentials, but gave up after the ominous warning that only serious job seekers need apply.
So far, there’s no data about how many have been serious enough to join. What does seem clear, though, is that to fill 50,000 jobs you’d at least have to have twice or three times the number of resumes in the pool.
Could it be that 150,000 people have or will have done so by this November?
If we assume that’s happened or soon will, each one of those job applicants must be second-guessing that decision to sign up. Trump and Miller have rejected Project 2025 as the one-stop-shop for future jobs. Will they reject those job applicants, too? Could it be the Project 2025 seal-of-approval quickly moves those resumes into the reject pile?
The Conservative LinkedIn, of course, also could be nothing more than political marketing; a sly way to cull email addresses of devoted Trump supporters, with no real expectations these resumes would be taken seriously, should Trump be elected. It’s too early to know how seriously we should take this, but right now it seems the Republican candidate isn’t interested any time soon, at least not for all to see.
