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DURING THE BIDEN PRESIDENCY, Paul Dans—director of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation–spearheaded plan for the next conservative administration—started on a lesser-known facet of the controversial program. In order to carry out Project 2025’s extensive policy framework for reconfiguring the federal government, Dans began mocking up a personnel database, one he reportedly envisioned as a “conservative LinkedIn” that would provide the next Republican occupant of the White House with thousands of appointment-ready, MAGA-devoted job candidates to fill out the political workforce. To test the ideological mettle of those who wanted to be included in the database, Dans required applicants to fill out a questionnaire that asked for specifics on their political beliefs and the names of public figures they most admired.
In June, more than 13,000 responses to that survey were obtained and published by Distributed Denial of Secrets, a nonprofit online library of “leaked and hacked datasets.” The responses show that the men and women who bought into the Project 2025 pitch frequently professed extreme beliefs and questionable political affinities, including support for authoritarian leaders abroad, deep respect for racialist thinkers, and severe condemnations of U.S. civil rights law. And in the months since Donald Trump returned to the White House, many of these MAGA hopefuls have taken up positions in the federal government and are implementing the administration’s policies.
In reviewing the leaked materials, I have identified a number of deeply concerning questionnaire responses that can be connected to people who now hold positions of influence as newly minted assistant secretaries, senior advisers, and policy analysts across the federal government. Such responses offered praise for extremists and authoritarians popular among the new right, including El Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, and American right-wing thinker Pat Buchanan, and reflected beliefs that might call into question the applicants suitability for government employment. For instance, the man now responsible for running the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights seems to have attacked the “civil rights state,” and many respondents railed against the country’s changing demographics.
The acting assistant secretary for legislative affairs for the Department of Homeland Security, Dillon McGregor, apparently effusively praised El Salvador’s authoritarian president in one survey response that was included in the leaked database and contained personal information matching McGregor. Nayib Bukele “has imposed his will in defense of the rights of his people, against widespread domestic tyranny and corruption which masqueraded as democracy,” one of the answers states. It then condemned American institutions and implied that the United States needs its own Bukele:
We are in a similar situation in the US, where the very “democratic” institutions of our republic serve almost solely to undermine the lives of our people and their futures, the integrity of our economy and standing aboard, bleeding our nation dry and poisoning what little blood we have left.
First elected president of El Salvador in 2019, Bukele has overseen the repeal of the country’s presidential term limits and the erosion of civil liberties, all of which he has justified through the unilateral imposition of an indefinite “state of emergency” that began in 2022. Bukele has also been a close collaborator of President Trump, agreeing to hold in the megaprison he built, CECOT, people deported by the administration—including the illegally deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Another detainee, Andry Hernández Romero, a gay hairstylist, reported after being released from CECOT that he was beaten and sexually abused by guards during his incarceration; he described the facility as “hell on earth.” McGregor did not respond to my requests for comment on his apparent praise of Bukele.
Another questionnaire response listed “the civil rights state” as the public policy issue he was most passionate about in his Project 2025 questionnaire response. This author of this response gave the name Craig Trainor—which is the name of the individual who is now the acting assistant secretary for civil rights in the Department of Education, where in February he authored an especially strident “Dear Colleague” letter to colleges and universities, threatening their federal funding if they ran afoul of the current administration’s interpretation of civil rights law. Trainor also did not respond to my requests for comment, but the personal identifying information in the unredacted version of the database provided to me by DDoSecrets matched his own. The full response maintains that “the 1964 Civil Rights Act and its subsequent innovations has become, what the late Angelo Codevilla called, ‘the little law that ate the Constitution.’” Institutional fruits of the Civil Rights Act, it asserts, “are antithetical to the American founding, its Christian moral foundation and traditions, the Constitution, and a free and well-ordered society.”1
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THE LEAKED DATABASE also connected the names of several current employees at the Office of Personnel Management to politically extreme statements. That office, which functions as a sort of HR department in most administrations, has, in the Trump administration, been the hub of efforts to make it possible to remove civil servants on political grounds, a policy usually referred to as “Schedule F” reclassification. A representative of OPM declined to comment when I asked if the responses represented OPM culture or reflected ongoing discussions within the agency.
Let’s look at a few of the responses apparently tied to OPM personnel.
Noah Peters is a DOGE agent who now works as an OPM senior adviser. Questionnaire responses tied to that name praise both Bukele and preeminent paleoconservative Pat Buchanan.2 In particular, Buchanan is put forward as the “one person, past or present,” most responsible for the respondent’s political philosophy, while Bukele is identified as “one living public policy figure” admired by the respondent. “I greatly admire Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador,” the answer states. “He has done what was thought impossible: successfully curb criminal gang violence in Central America. In doing so, he has given back freedom to his citizens– freedom to walk the streets without fear.” Peters did not respond to my requests for comment.
According to reporting by the New York Times, Peters was already being considered for a position in the Department of Labor as part of Project 2025 two years ago. In January of this year, 404 Media determined Peters was the likely author of at least one early OPM memo trying to make it easier to fire civil servants and replace them with dedicated partisans.
Christopher Smith was a policy adviser with OPM until August, according to government monitoring company LegiStorm. A questionnaire answer given under that name and with corresponding personal information also emphasized Buchanan’s influence and specifically praised Buchanan’s 2001 book The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization as “a biting commentary on the importance of establishing, maintaining, and cherishing national identity.” The respondent credits the book with making him “place a great deal of emphasis on community, shared values, and common history- all of which are rebutted by the modern orthodoxy of multiculturalism, open borders, and a million iterations of America as an ‘idea’ rather than a nation.” Smith declined to comment when contacted.
Brandon Mayhew has, since May, been a senior adviser at OPM. A set of questionnaire responses submitted under that name argued that authoritarian Viktor Orbán’s regime in Hungary ought to serve as a model for the United States. “I think [Orbán] has the right idea of fusing faith, family, and nationhood to create a very poignant political blend,” said one answer. “This is a political blend that promote [sic] the longevity and security of Hungary as a nation and state (something that can certainly not be said for many western European states who are self-immolating). I think Orban’s simple method is something we should be importing en masse in our own political order.” Mayhew also did not respond to my questions.
Megan “Meg” Kilgannon, formerly of the right-wing Family Research Council, is now director of strategic partnerships for the Department of Education. Questionnaire answers tied to that name might serve as a synecdoche of the extremism now deemed acceptable for political appointees. Kilgannon declined to comment when reached by phone, but the personal information included in the unredacted version of the database provided to me by DDoSecrets matched hers. The Department of Education did not respond to emails requesting comment on Kilgannon’s apparent responses.
The answers under Kilgannon’s name heap praise on far-right intellectuals Buchanan and Sam Francis. “The writing and philosophies of Pat Buchanan and Sam Francis have been foundational in my political formation,” one answer reads. “Over the years they are proven right again and again.” Another answer praising one of Buchanan’s books emphasizes that “demographics are drivers of social change, in both positive and negative ways.”
Kilgannon is just one of many people currently serving in the executive branch who appear to have cited Buchanan as a key influence. But she was the only one I saw who also apparently cited the late Sam Francis, a close friend of Buchanan’s and a major figure on the hard right. In 1995, Francis was let go by the conservative Washington Times, where he had been a columnist, after fellow right-wing provocateur Dinesh D’Souza drew attention to racist comments he’d made at an Atlanta convention. Francis had declared white people needed to “reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites,” a belief he would continue to espouse until his death a decade later.
Because of their openly racialist views, Francis and Buchanan over the years were increasingly deemed verboten by the conservative mainstream. In 1992, National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. wrote that Buchanan was “politically,” if not personally, antisemitic. A few years later, Donald Trump publicly called Buchanan “a Hitler lover” and “an antisemite.” And in a 2022 article in Vanity Fair, Alec Dent wrote that Francis “spent his final years largely confined to the fever swamps of explicitly white supremacist organizations.”
If, as the Reagan-era maxim goes, “personnel is policy,” then in light of these questionnaire responses we should not be surprised that the second Trump administration continues attacking Americans’ civil rights, undermining free and fair elections, and prioritizing white immigration.
SEVERAL RESPONSES connected to other people who have staffed the second Trump administration specifically cited a prominent 2020 book critiquing civil rights laws—in one case, referencing the book in support of a claim that the Civil Rights Act of 1965 “essentially replaced the original Constitution.” Another answer mentioned Curtis Yarvin, the neoreactionary monarchist, as one of the “more exciting contemporary thinkers” who’d influenced the respondent. Yet another listed the “demographic transformation of the United States and the Western World” as the respondent’s most important issue.
While none of the individuals mentioned above confirmed to me that they had filled out the Project 2025 form, despite the matching names and corresponding personal information, three other individuals who self-identified as “liberals” in responses included in the database told me they remembered filling out the Project 2025 questionnaire, either to “gum up” the application process or to keep an eye on the effort. A fourth didn’t respond to an email I sent but had published a YouTube video in September 2023 that showed her filling out the form. Additionally, one conservative whose information was included in the leak agreed with some of the sentiments connected to his name during a brief phone conversation, but stated he couldn’t remember filling out the form and maintained the wording of the answers did not “sound like me.”
The Heritage Foundation did not respond to my questions about the published database, or answer an earlier request for comment sent by left-leaning news outlet the Intercept.
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The answer, in all fairness, does not condemn the concept of civil rights in toto, and indeed allows that a hypothetical Civil Rights Act of 2025 should still “prohibit intentional discrimination.”
For the benefit of younger readers, Pat Buchanan had a long career first as a staffer for Republican Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and then as a right-wing pundit—punctuated by three runs for the presidency, in 1992, 1996, and 2000. The 1992 campaign is perhaps most memorable for his inflammatory speech at the Republican National Convention. A prominent far-right thinker, Buchanan has been obsessed with the relative “decline” of European populations for decades, as evinced by his books The Death of the West (2001) and Suicide of a Superpower (2011). In the acknowledgements section of the latter, as progressive nonprofit Media Matters pointed out, Buchanan gives “special thanks” for research assistance to an anti-immigration activist who’d written for the white-nationalist site VDare. A few years earlier, that activist had pleaded guilty to karate chopping a black woman on the head after allegedly calling her the N-word.
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