Former President Donald Trump’s transition operation is compiling lists of names of people to keep out of a second Trump administration.
The lists of undesirable staffers include people linked to the Project 2025 policy blueprint; officials who resigned in protest of Trump’s response to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol; and others perceived as disloyal to the former president, said two former Trump officials familiar with the discussions. The former officials were granted anonymity to discuss private transition operations.
The effort is the latest indication that a second Trump administration could have a starkly different personnel makeup than the first in positions ranging from the most senior aides to lower-level appointees. The former president and his allies have long stressed the value of loyalty among staffers, and they appear eager to avoid the leaks and staff churn that plagued Trump during his first term.
Donald Trump Jr. — Trump’s son and an honorary chair of the transition team — is leading the effort to assemble names of banned staffers, one former Trump official said.
“Clearly people working on Project 2025 are blacklisted,” said a second former official. But a sweeping ban on contributors to that project — which boasts the support of more than 100 conservative organizations — could complicate efforts to staff up a Republican administration, and it’s unclear whether a future Trump administration would stick to such a ban.
The effort to ban certain people from joining a Trump administration is occurring alongside the transition team’s work to compile names of prospective political appointees for a second Trump term.
‘Over my dead body’
“It’s a good idea,” Myron Ebell, who led the incoming Trump team’s Environmental Protection Agency transition operation in 2016, said of keeping logs of unwelcome staffers.
“During the first Trump transition, I had a typewritten sheet, which I did not have electronically, which I gave to people in the personnel shop called, ‘Over my dead body,’” Ebell said. “The list kept getting longer as I thought of more people that I had thought of originally.”
That list included names of people who had served during the George W. Bush administration, he said, who were “soft green Republicans” and others whom Ebell knew to be “anti-Trump, even if they weren’t publicly so.” He thought the list was “very successful,” Ebell said. “The only people who got jobs that should have been on the list were people that I didn't even think to put on the list like Ryan Zinke,” he said, referring to Trump’s former Interior secretary, who stepped down amid questions about his private business dealings.
Ebell had heard about the effort to maintain lists of banned appointees, he said, but he had not heard it directly from the transition team.
Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, declined to comment explicitly on efforts to bar certain people from getting administration jobs.
“President Trump announced a Trump Vance transition leadership group to initiate the process of preparing for what comes after the election and will choose the best people for his Cabinet to undo all the damage dangerously liberal Kamala Harris has done to our country,” Cheung said in a statement.
‘Naughty and nice list’
Trump transition officials have signaled publicly that there are certain people they plan to keep out of an administration if the former president reclaims the White House.
Howard Lutnick, the co-chair of Trump’s transition team, told the New York Post this month that an incoming Trump administration wouldn’t consider recruits tied to Project 2025, the administration playbook organized by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Project 2025 is “radioactive,” Lutnick told the outlet.
The Heritage Foundation did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Trump has sought to distance himself from the policy blueprint as it has come under fire from Democrats who portray its ideas as extreme.
Appointees in a second Trump term will need to show "fidelity" to Trump and to his agenda, Lutnick recently told the Financial Times.
Trump Jr. recently told The Wall Street Journal that the transition team’s main goal was "just preventing the bad actors from getting in."
"There's a lot of people that put the R next to their name, but then they do whatever the swamp wants, because they're looking for the next consulting gig or something like that," Trump Jr. told the newspaper. "We're doing a lot with vetting. My job is to prevent those guys, more so than actually picking people."
Keeping logs of desirable and undesirable appointees is standard fare for presidential transitions, said another person who worked on the Trump 2016 transition.
“It’s not uncommon in D.C. to have a naughty and nice list,” that person said. They have heard chatter, that person said, about making sure that people have a clear understanding about who should or should not serve in a Trump administration.
Boxing out conservatives tied to Project 2025, whose authors include former senior Trump officials, could make it more difficult to staff up an executive branch with slots for about 4,000 political appointees.
Project 2025 has been compiling names and resumes from people interested in serving in a Trump administration.
Boycotting people linked to Project 2025 could disqualify “many highly qualified pro-Trump people,” Ebell said. “It shrinks the pool considerably.”
But after “the election or after the inauguration, they can change their mind about that,” Ebell said. “I see it as a political tactic, not as a permanent ban.”
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