Email Reveals Project 2025 Coordinator Dangling Administration Job

WASHINGTON — A coordinator of Project 2025, the right-wing policy playbook for a second Donald Trump administration, suggested to a possible contributor that working on the project would be a good way to win an administration job.

Steve Bradbury, a former Trump administration official now with the Heritage Foundation, said in an email last year to a prospective Project 2025 contributor that the leaders of the project would be able to put in a good word if Trump gets back in the White House.

“Those who show real commitment and provide valuable contributions will be recognized by the leaders of the project, whose recommendations are likely to carry influence with those who make personnel decisions for any future administration that embraces our policy proposals,” Bradbury wrote to Trent McCotter, an attorney who served in the first Trump administration’s Department of Justice, in March 2023.

The group American Oversight obtained the email through a public records request to George Mason University, where McCotter worked as an adjunct professor at the time.

McCotter, now a partner with the law firm Boyden Gray, responded that he could contribute based on his experience in the Justice Department. He is listed as one of dozens of Project 2025 contributors.

The Trump campaign said it’s “false” that contributing to Project 2025, a project of the Heritage Foundation and an array of right-wing groups, could help someone get an administration job if Trump wins.

“President Trump has repeatedly disavowed Project 2025, and no such discussions about who will serve in a second Trump Administration have taken place,” Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said Thursday in an email. “President Trump, and only President Trump, will choose the best people to make our country great again when he wins.”

Some of Project 2025’s most controversial recommendations include clamping down on abortion access and firing thousands of nonpartisan government workers to replace them with Trump loyalists. The chapter on the Justice Department said the department should enforce a 19th-century law banning sending “obscene matter” and abortion pills through the mail.

Despite disavowals from Trump and his campaign, the Bradbury email is another reflection of the likely ties between Trump’s inner circle and the authors of the 900-page policy agenda. Russ Vought, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump and a lead author of the project, recently told undercover videographers that the former president is “very supportive” of his work.

The Heritage Foundation did not respond to a request for comment. McCotter didn’t respond to a request for comment through his firm.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) highlighted the Bradbury email during a House Oversight Committee hearing on Thursday. Several witnesses called by Republicans to testify about the “failures” of the Joe Biden administration were themselves Project 2025 contributors.

“We’ve convened a panel of four witnesses to Project 2025, the MAGA manifesto for a second Trump term, so they can audition for Mr. Trump’s approval and land a spot on his Cabinet,” Raskin said.

One of the witnesses, Mandy Gunasekara, previously served in the Environmental Protection Agency under Trump and contributed to Project 2025.

“I did author the EPA chapter on Project 2025 but in the course of that I did not work with President Trump,” Gunasekara said. “I am not vying for a position in the next administration. I’ve actually left D.C. and I’ve moved to a small town in Mississippi.”