President Donald Trump disavowed the Project 2025 policy blueprint during his campaign last year as Democrats attacked the document and its contents. Since then, Trump has invited some of the most prominent contributors to the conservative playbook into his administration.
The document, which outlined a vision for a future Republican presidency, generally foreshadowed Trump’s sweeping moves to slash government agencies and cut federal funding in his first weeks in office, though there are also areas of departure.
As the dust settles after a whirlwind of Cabinet nominations, confirmation hearings and early administration actions, here’s where some prominent authors and contributors involved in Project 2025 have landed in the Trump administration.
Russell Vought
As a principal author of Project 2025, Vought — Trump’s pick to direct the Office of Management and Budget in his first and second terms — wrote a chapter outlining plans to overhaul the executive branch and refocus federal agencies to serve the president’s agenda. In his chapter, Vought referred to OMB as “the president’s air-traffic control system,” with its director tasked with serving as “the keeper of ‘commander’s intent.’”
Vought wrote in the section that the next administration would require “boldness to bend or break bureaucracy to the presidential will” and “self-denial” to send power from Washington back to the hands of American families.
“The overall situation is constitutionally dire, unsustainably expensive, and in urgent need of repair,” he wrote. “Nothing less than survival of self-governance is at stake.”
In a memo to the heads of the White House budget and personnel management offices late last month, Vought and Charles Ezell, the director of the Office of Personnel Management, directed the agencies to brace for mass layoffs. The memo said the federal government is “costly, inefficient, and deeply in debt.”
“At the same time, it is not producing results for the American public,” they wrote. “Instead, tax dollars are being siphoned off to fund unproductive and unnecessary programs that benefit radical interest groups while hurting hard-working Americans.”
Peter Navarro
Trump selected Navarro, a longtime former aide, in December to be his senior counselor for trade and manufacturing. Navarro spent four months in prison last year after he was found in contempt of Congress for not complying with a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
In his section of the policy road map, Navarro outlined a plan to raise tariffs on the European Union, China and India to balance the U.S. trade deficit. Navarro — whom Trump called his “tough guy on China” during his 2016 campaign — also listed dozens of policy recommendations for responding to Chinese “aggression,” including banning Chinese-owned social media apps like TikTok and holding China “accountable” for the Covid-19 virus.
“If the new U.S. President wishes to defend this country against the serious existential threat posed by Communist China, that President will adopt all of these proposals through the requisite presidential executive orders and memoranda,” Navarro wrote.
Trump moved forward with his promises to roll out a series of sweeping tariffs last week, placing tariffs on all goods coming into the United States from Canada and Mexico and threatening a trade war with the country’s closest trading partners. But one of his first moves in office was to issue an executive order delaying a TikTok ban that was due to take place under federal law.
Brendan Carr
Carr, Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, wrote the Project 2025 chapter outlining a series of reforms to the FCC — specifically ending “wasteful spending policies,” addressing TikTok’s threat to the United States and reining in big tech companies.
“The FCC should engage in a serious top-to-bottom review of its regulations and take steps to rescind any that are overly cumbersome or outdated,” he wrote.
Since he took the helm of the FCC as chairman in January, Carr has opened probes into major telecommunication companies like Verizon and Comcast to ensure they aren’t “promoting invidious forms of discrimination in violation of FCC and civil rights laws.” (Comcast owns NBCUniversal, which is the parent company of NBC News.)
Carr has been an FCC commissioner since 2017 and was unanimously confirmed to another five-year term in 2023.
In a string of emails from 2022 obtained by Bloomberg, Carr expressed interest in writing a chapter for the book and agreed to participate after an internal FCC ethics review determined it wouldn’t be considered political activity, as it was unpaid, and therefore wouldn’t violate the Hatch Act.
Adam Candeub
Candeub, the newly anointed general counsel for the FCC, wrote a Project 2025 chapter scrutinizing the Federal Trade Commission, arguing for a “broader” view of antitrust laws that move beyond a “purely economic understanding” of competitive markets.
“Antitrust law can combat dominant firms’ baleful effects on democratic institutions such as free speech, the marketplace of ideas, shareholder control, and managerial accountability as well as collusive behavior with government,” he wrote.
Candeub was head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration during Trump’s first term before he was chosen to be deputy associate attorney general in the final weeks of that administration. He has been a critical voice in Trump’s moves to target social media companies with claims of anti-conservative bias, railing against Twitter and Facebook over allegations that they were censoring conservative views in 2020.
Other contributors
Among the list of nearly 300 contributors preceding the playbook, a number of other people have also landed in Trump’s administration. Border czar Tom Homan gets a credit in the book, as do Brian J. Cavanaugh, the associate director for homeland security at OMB, and James Baehr, general counsel for the Department of Veteran Affairs.
Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins and OMB senior adviser Stephen Billy are also among the Project 2025 alums who now staff the Trump administration — with Atkins getting a special mention in a chapter on financial regulatory agencies and Billy getting a credit in Vought’s section on the executive branch.
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