Wednesday · February 1, 2023

Project 2025 launches Presidential Administration Academy — Heritage Foundation training pipeline for future conservative political appointees

confirmed Importance 8/10 ~2 min read 2 sources 4 actors

What Happened

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 launched the Presidential Administration Academy on February 1, 2023, as the third pillar of the four-pillar Project 2025 architecture. The Academy is an online on-demand training program designed to equip conservative political appointees to govern from Day 1 of the next Republican administration. It operates alongside the Presidential Personnel Database (Pillar 2) and the Mandate for Leadership policy document (Pillar 1) as part of Heritage’s systematic government-in-waiting infrastructure.

Key Facts

The Academy launched with plans for 40+ training sessions. By August 2024, ProPublica and Documented obtained and published 23 never-before-released videos totaling over 14 hours of content. The program featured 36 speakers, of whom 29 had prior Trump administration experience.

Confirmed speakers include:

  • Roger Severino — Heritage VP for domestic policy; Project 2025 Chapter 14 (HHS) author; former Trump-1 HHS Civil Rights director
  • Spencer Chretien — Project 2025 associate director
  • Katie Sullivan — former DOJ acting assistant attorney general
  • Steven Bradbury — Heritage distinguished fellow; former NHTSA administrator
  • Bethany Kozma — former USAID deputy chief of staff

Confirmed curriculum topics include: regulatory circumvention; FOIA avoidance; executive-order drafting; leveraging federal grants; identifying and removing “left-wing” federal employees; media strategy (use only conservative outlets); and “Deep State 101.”

Why This Event Matters

The Academy is the institutional vehicle that converts the Heritage personnel database (applicants) into trained government operators ready to deploy on Day 1. The 14+ hours of curriculum documented by ProPublica constitutes the most complete publicly available record of what the incoming Trump administration was trained to do: not merely implement Project 2025’s policy goals but circumvent the administrative and legal mechanisms designed to check executive power. The curriculum’s systematic instruction in FOIA avoidance and regulatory circumvention is structurally distinct from policy alignment — it is operational capacity-building.

The speaker roster’s 29-of-36 Trump-administration-veteran composition documents the feedback loop: Trump-1 officials trained the Trump-2 officer corps.

Research Gaps

  • Enrollment counts and certificate-completion rates not publicly disclosed
  • Whether Academy completion was a prerequisite for Heritage Personnel Database inclusion
  • Whether the training tracks were differentiated by agency target or theological-stream affiliation
  • No public audit has traced Academy graduates to specific Trump-2 administration placements
  • mandate-for-leadership
  • heritage-foundation
  • trump-2-personnel-pipelines
  • roberts-kevin
  • project-2025-personnel-architecture-reconnaissance

Sources & Citations

[1] Project 2025 Announces the Launch of the Presidential Administration Academy — Heritage Foundation · Feb 1, 2023 Tier 1
[2] Inside Project 2025's Secret Training Videos — ProPublica / Documented · Aug 10, 2024 Tier 1
Tiers Tier 1 court records & gov docs · Tier 2 established outlets · Tier 3 regional & specialty press · Tier 4 opinion or single-source. Methodology →
Cite this entry
The Cascade Ledger. “Project 2025 launches Presidential Administration Academy — Heritage Foundation training pipeline for future conservative political appointees.” The Capture Cascade Timeline, February 1, 2023. https://capturecascade.org/event/2023-02-01--project-2025-presidential-administration-academy-launch/