Donald Trump’s transition team is reportedly preparing a blacklist of potential officials to be banned from a future administration, with special emphasis being placed on those with links to the radical Project 2025 plan to overhaul the US government.
The former president’s eldest son, Donald Jr, is spearheading the drive to compile the list of barred staffers, according to Politico, citing a former official in the first Trump administration.
“Clearly people working on Project 2025 are blacklisted,” another ex-official told the site.
The Republican nominee publicly disowned the 922-page document, prepared by the Heritage Foundation thinktank, after polls showed that its ideologically driven prescriptions – including mass firings of civil servants and plans to outlaw abortion – were an electoral liability.
Many of its leading architects, including its former director, Paul Dans, served in Trump’s administration. Dans has since been critical of some of the Republican candidate’s senior campaign aides for their role in influencing his decision to distance himself from the project.
Others excluded will be those who resigned in protest over the January 6 insurrection, when a Trump-inspired mob attacked the US Capitol in a failed bid to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
Some of Trump’s most senior officials resigned from the administration in its final days in protest over the episode, which at the time was widely – and wrongly – thought to herald the end of his political career. They included the education secretary, Betsy DeVos; Mick Mulvaney, the former White House chief of staff; and Elaine Chao, the former transportation secretary and wife of Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate.
Exclusion orders will also be slapped on those perceived as disloyal. Trump has repeatedly made plain that he considers loyalty to be the prime quality in picking top staff members.
The barred list appears to signal that a future Trump presidency will be different from the first iteration, which was marked by a record staff turnover rate compared with previous recent presidents and staffed by officials who often saw a key part of their roles as reining in Trump’s most extreme instincts.
Howard Lutnick, the co-chair of Trump’s transition team, has said that appointees will need to show “fidelity” to the former president and his agenda.
Lutnick told the New York Post this month that the Heritage Foundation was “radioactive” because of its intimate role in Project 2025 and that no one linked to the project would be included. “That’s a clear position,” he said.
Others have voiced scepticism, pointing out that an estimated 18,000 Republicans and 100 thinktanks have had some involvement with creating the document, meaning that a total ban would complicate staffing efforts.
Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, has longstanding links with the Heritage Foundation and wrote the foreword to a forthcoming book by its president, Kevin Roberts.
