Former President Donald Trump’s transition operation involves drawing up lists of names of people to keep out of a second Trump administration.

The lists of undesirable personnel include people linked to the Project 2025 political plan; officials who resigned in protest of Trump’s response to the January 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 very different staff makeup than the first, in positions ranging from the highest-ranking aides to lower-level appointees. The former president and his allies have long emphasized the value of staff loyalty, and they appear eager to avoid the leaks and staff turnover that plagued Trump during his first term.

Donald Trump Jr. — Trump’s son and honorary chairman of the transition team — is leading the effort to gather the names of banned staffers, a former Trump official said.

“It is clear that people working on Project 2025 are blacklisted,” said a second former official. But a sweeping ban on contributors to the project — which has the support of more than 100 conservative organizations — could complicate efforts to staff a Republican administration, and it’s unclear whether a future Trump administration would stick to it to such a ban.

Efforts to bar certain individuals from joining the Trump administration are occurring alongside the transition team’s work to compile the names of potential political nominees for a second Trump term.

“On my corpse”

“It’s a good idea,” Myron Ebell, who led the new Trump team’s Environmental Protection Agency transition operation in 2016, said of keeping a log of unwanted staff members.

“During the first Trump transition, I had a typed sheet, which I didn’t have electronically, that I gave to the people in the staff store called ‘Over My Dead Body,'” Ebell said. “The list kept growing as I thought of more people I had originally thought of.”

That list included the names of people who had served in the George W. Bush administration, he said, who were “green and soft Republicans” and others who Ebell knew were “anti- Trump, even if they weren’t publicly.” He felt the list was “very successful,” Ebell said. “The only people who got jobs that should have been on the list were people I hadn’t even thought about putting on the list, like Ryan Zinke,” he said, referring to the Trump’s former Interior Secretary, who resigned amid questions about his tenure. private commercial relationships.

Ebell had heard about efforts to maintain lists of barred appointees, he said, but he had not heard about them directly from the transition team.

Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, declined to comment explicitly on efforts to bar certain people from administrative positions.

“President Trump announced the creation of a Trump Vance Transition Leadership Group to begin the process of preparing for what follows the election and choosing the best people for his cabinet to undo all the dangerously liberal damage that Kamala Harris has caused to our country,” Cheung said. a declaration.

“Naughty and nice list”

Trump transition officials have signaled publicly that they plan to keep some people out of the administration if the former president reclaims the White House.

Howard Lutnick, co-chairman of Trump’s transition team, told the New York Post this month that a new Trump administration would not consider hires linked 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 political project as he has been criticized by Democrats who characterize his ideas as extreme.

Trump’s second-term appointees will have to demonstrate “loyalty” to Trump and his agenda, Lutnick recently told Financial Times.

Trump Jr. recently said The Wall Street Journal that the transition team’s main goal was “simply to keep bad actors out.”

“A lot of people put the R next to their name, but then they do what the swamp wants, because they’re looking for the next consulting job or something like that,” Trump Jr. told the newspaper. “We do a lot of checks. My job is to prevent these guys, more than to select people.”

Keeping a log of desirable and undesirable appointments is standard practice for presidential transitions, said another person who worked on the 2016 Trump transition.

“It’s not uncommon in Washington to have a list of naughty guys and nice guys,” this person said. They have heard discussions, this person said, about the need to make sure people have a clear understanding of who should or should not serve in the Trump administration.

Weeding out conservatives tied to Project 2025, whose authors include former top Trump officials, could make it harder to build an executive branch with slots for about 4,000 political appointees.

The 2025 Project has compiled the names and resumes of people interested in serving in a Trump administration.

Boycotting people linked to Project 2025 could disqualify “many highly qualified pro-Trump people,” Ebell said. “This reduces the pool significantly.”

But after “the election or after the inauguration, they may change their minds about it,” Ebell said. “I see this as a political tactic and not a permanent ban.”