Revealed: Far-right group's plan to flood the next GOP administration — whether it's Trump or not

The far-right Heritage Foundation is preparing to create a career pipeline to staff the next Republican administration with thousands of their own people, whether or not that president is Trump, reportedThe New York Times Thursday.

"Think of it as a right-wing LinkedIn. This so-called Project 2025 — part of a $22 million presidential transition operation at a scale never attempted before in conservative politics — is being led by the Heritage Foundation, a group that has been staffing Republican administrations since the Reagan era," reported Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman. "Heritage usually compiles its own personnel lists, and spends far less doing so. But for this election, after conservatives and Mr. Trump himself decried what they viewed as terrible staffing decisions made during his administration, more than 50 conservative groups have temporarily set aside rivalries to team up with Heritage on the project, set to start Friday."

Heritage, according to the report, has already identified "hundreds of thousands" of potential recruits — and has a goal of getting 20,000 people into the next GOP administration.

"The glaring problem with such an effort is that the various Republican hopefuls would most likely use different staffing criteria. Mr. Trump, the clear front-runner, cares far more about personal loyalty than ideological convictions," said the report. "Indeed, he spent the bulk of his presidency trying to root out people whom he perceived as aligned with political critics, such as the Bush family, or Obama administration officials. In meetings at Mar-a-Lago over the past two years, Mr. Trump has repeatedly complained that his first administration was full of 'snakes' and 'traitors.' Those he complains about the most are not career bureaucrats but instead people like William P. Barr, a former Barry Goldwater supporter whom Mr. Trump himself selected as his attorney general."

The Heritage Foundation is infamous for pushing an extreme-right agenda; one of its key legal minds, Hans von Spakovsky, is an unapologetic opponent of voting rights who held meetings with Republican officials to promote unsubstantiated voter fraud claims ahead of the 2020 election.

The group has gone through a bit of an identity crisis in recent years; the group's longtime leader, former South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, was fired in 2017 as officials believed he was shaping the group into a Trump loyalist club.