Project 2025 Presidential Personnel Database launches — Heritage Foundation 'conservative LinkedIn' with ideological screening for 20,000 vetted candidates

What Happened

The Project 2025 Presidential Personnel Database launched in approximately March 2023 as the second pillar of the four-pillar Project 2025 architecture. Heritage Foundation Project 2025 director Paul Dans described its design as a “conservative LinkedIn”: an online database where conservatives self-submitted resumes alongside an ideological questionnaire, with candidate profiles showing occupation, recommending organizations, target agencies, training progress, and vetting findings — including a “red flags” field.

In May 2023, former White House Presidential Personnel Office director John McEntee joined Project 2025 as senior advisor to run the personnel pillar, alongside former PPO employee James Bacon. McEntee and Bacon had co-developed the 2020 PPO loyalty questionnaire for the first Trump administration; the Project 2025 vetting criteria built on that model.

Key Facts

Screening criteria (confirmed by multiple tier-2 sources):

• An ideological questionnaire with “detailed questions about ideological and policy beliefs”
• Specific policy-stance questions, including: “Do you agree: Life has a right to legal protection from conception to natural death?” and “Do you agree: The President should be able to advance his/her agenda through the bureaucracy without hindrance from unelected federal officials?”
• A “webcrawl” report reviewing social media accounts
• Completion of the “Deep State 101” Academy training module
• Candidate interviews assessing fitness for service

Database size: ProPublica (September 2024) confirmed more than 10,000 vetted candidates. Heritage’s stated target was 20,000 by end-2024. Whether the 20,000 target was reached is not confirmed by any public source.

Transition usage: NBC News (November 22, 2024) confirmed that Trump transition officials used the Project 2025 database for potential hires across the 4,000+ political appointee slots. Transition personnel described names from the database as “conservative, qualified and vetted.”

Data leak (June 2025): DDoSecrets/SiegedSec released 13,726 application questionnaire submissions in June 2025 after hacking Heritage Foundation. The Intercept received an unredacted version. Analysis confirmed the ideological-screening questionnaire structure; spot-checks matched specific database applicants to confirmed Trump administration nominations (e.g., Paul Ingrassia, nominated to head the Office of Special Counsel).

Why This Event Matters

The Personnel Database is the operational mechanism by which Project 2025 converted ideological alignment into staffing capacity. The database design — with its “recommending organizations” field — implicates the 100+ Project 2025 advisory-board organizations as active participants in curating personnel recommendations, not merely endorsing the policy document. McEntee’s PPO background makes the database an explicit successor to the Trump-1 loyalty-vetting apparatus.

The database is structurally distinct from the chapter-author pipeline: chapter authors (Vought, Severino, Carr, Homan, etc.) were placed through institutional relationships, not through database self-submission. The database served the sub-cabinet, career-level, and junior-staff placement layer — the scale at which 4,000+ positions needed to be filled.

Research Gaps

• Whether the 20,000-candidate target was reached by end-2024
• Whether the database’s “recommending organizations” field produced de facto stream-by-stream curation (EPPC recommending HHS candidates; CRA recommending OMB candidates)
• No systematic recommendation-to-placement audit has been published
• Internal database structure (beyond what Dans’s public descriptions reveal) is not public

Related Entries

• mandate-for-leadership
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