The Heritage Foundation is hiring former director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office John McEntee as a senior advisor with Project 2025, its presidential personnel building project.
Project 2025 is Heritage’s $22 million effort to identify and train a database full of conservatives to serve in the next Republican presidential administration. McEntee joins Heritage after managing over 4,000 federal appointments when he led the Presidential Personnel Office from January 2020 until the end of the Trump administration. (RELATED: Conservative Leaders Reveal Plan To Get Personnel In Order After Trump Administration Chaos)
John McEntee, a former director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office and favorite of former President Donald Trump, is joining @Prjct2025 as a senior advisor.@PhilipWegmann has the scoop for @RealClearNews. https://t.co/8Vynf7pamT
— Rob Bluey (@RobertBluey) May 2, 2023
McEntee’s appointment was first reported Tuesday by RealClearPolitics (RCP). He told RCP Tuesday about how vetting candidates ahead of time will ease the process of filling political appointments. “We probably won’t have to be as crazy or hardline if we do all the work now,” McEntee said. Pre-screening candidates “actually makes things so much easier,” McEntee added in his RCP interview.
A close confidant to the former president, McEntee began his time in the Trump administration as a body man and rose his way up to personnel director.
Project 2025 is headed by Paul Dans, former Chief of Staff at the Office of Personnel Management in the Trump administration. He previously told the Daily Caller about the project’s mission to develop an “entire cadre of special operators” to work in a presidential administration.
Heritage published in April the ninth edition of its “Mandate for Leadership,” a 30 chapter policy guide crafted by dozens of conservative experts. The book is part of Project 2025’s personnel building strategy and it is intended for potential appointees as well as presidential candidates.