Inside Project 2025’s secret training videos

One centerpiece of that program is dozens of never-before-published videos created for Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy. The vast majority of these videos — 23 in all, totaling more than 14 hours of content — were provided to ProPublica and Documented by a person who had access to them.

This story was originally published by ProPublica. 

Project 2025, the controversial playbook and policy agenda for a right-wing presidential administration, has lost its director and faced scathing criticism from both Democratic groups and former President Donald Trump. But Project 2025’s plan to train an army of political appointees who could battle against the so-called deep state government bureaucracy on behalf of a future Trump administration remains on track.

One centerpiece of that program is dozens of never-before-published videos created for Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy. The vast majority of these videos — 23 in all, totaling more than 14 hours of content — were provided to ProPublica and Documented by a person who had access to them.

The Project 2025 videos coach future appointees on everything from the nuts and bolts of governing to how to outwit bureaucrats. There are strategies for avoiding embarrassing Freedom of Information Act disclosures and ensuring that conservative policies aren’t struck down by “left-wing judges.” Some of the content is routine advice that any incoming political appointee might be told. Other segments of the training offer guidance on radically changing how the federal government works and what it does.

In one video, Bethany Kozma, a conservative activist and former deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Trump administration, downplays the seriousness of climate change and says the movement to combat it is really part of a ploy to “control people.”

“If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere,” Kozma says.

In the same video, Kozma calls the idea of gender fluidity “evil.” Another speaker, Katie Sullivan, who was an acting assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice under Trump, takes aim at executive actions by the administration of President Joe Biden that created gender adviser positions throughout the federal government. The goal, Biden wrote in one order, was to “advance equal rights and opportunities, regardless of gender or gender identity.”

Sullivan says, “That position has to be eradicated, as well as all the task forces, the removal of all the equity plans from all the websites, and a complete rework of the language in internal and external policy documents and grant applications.”

Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, falsely saying that he knew nothing about it and had “no idea who is behind it.” In fact, he flew on a private jet with Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, which leads Project 2025. And in a 2022 speech at a Heritage Foundation event, Trump said, “This is a great group and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”

A review of the training videos shows that 29 of the 36 speakers have worked for Trump in some capacity — on his 2016-17 transition team, in the administration or on his 2024 reelection campaign. The videos appear to have been recorded before the resignation two weeks ago of Paul Dans, the leader of the 2025 project, and they are referenced on the project’s website. The Heritage Foundation said in a statement at the time of Dans’ resignation that it would end Project 2025’s policy-related work, but that its “collective efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels — federal, state, and local — will continue.”

The Heritage Foundation and most of the people who appear in the videos cited in this story did not respond to ProPublica’s repeated requests for comment. Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign who features in one of the videos, said, “As our campaign leadership and President Trump have repeatedly stated, Agenda 47 is the only official policy agenda from our campaign.”

Project 2025’s 887-page “Mandate for Leadership” document lays out a vast array of policy and governance proposals, including eliminating the Department of Education, slashing Medicaid, reclassifying tens of thousands of career civil servants so they could be more easily fired and replaced, giving the president greater power to control the DOJ and further restricting abortion access.

Democrats and liberal groups have criticized the project’s policy agenda as “extreme” and “authoritarian” while pointing out the many connections between Trump and the hundreds of people who contributed to the project.

“Trump’s attempts to distance himself from Project 2025 have always been disingenuous,” said Noah Bookbinder, president of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “The discovery that the vast majority of speakers in Project 2025 training videos are alumni of the Trump administration or have other close ties to Trump’s political operation is unsurprising further evidence of the close connection there.”

Several speakers in the videos acknowledge that the Trump administration was slowed by staffing challenges and the inexperience of its political appointees, and they offer lessons learned from their stumbles. Some of the advice appears at odds with conservative dogma, including a suggestion that the next administration may need to expand key government agencies to achieve the larger goal of slashing federal regulations.

Rick Dearborn, who helped lead Trump’s 2016 transition team and later served in the Trump White House as deputy chief of staff, recalled in one video how “tough” it was to find people to fill all of the key positions in the early days of the administration.

The personnel part of Project 2025 is “so important to the next president,” Dearborn says. “Establishing all of this, providing the expertise, looking at a database of folks that can be part of the administration, talking to you like we are right now about what is a transition about, why do I want to be engaged in it, what would my role be — that’s a luxury that we didn’t have,” referring to a database of potential political appointees.

Dan Huff, a former legal adviser in the White House Presidential Personnel Office under Trump, says in another video that future appointees should be prepared to enact significant changes in American government and be ready to face blowback when they do.

“If you’re not on board with helping implement a dramatic course correction because you’re afraid it’ll damage your future employment prospects, it’ll harm you socially — look, I get it,” Huff says. “That’s a real danger. It’s a real thing. But please: Do us all a favor and sit this one out.”

‘Eradicate Climate Change References’

The project’s experts outline regulatory and policy changes that future political appointees should prepare for in a Republican administration.

One video, titled “Hidden Meanings: The Monsters in the Attic,” is a 50-minute discussion of supposed left-wing code words and biased language that future appointees should be aware of and root out. In that video, Kozma says that U.S. intelligence agencies have named climate change as an increasingly dire threat to global stability, which, she says, illustrates how the issue “has infiltrated every part of the federal government.”

She then tells viewers that she sees climate change as merely a cover to engage in population control. “I think about the people who don’t want you to have children because of the” — here she makes air-quotes — “impact on the environment.” She adds, “This is part of their ultimate goal to control people.”

Later in the video, Katie Sullivan, the former acting assistant attorney general under Trump, advocates for removing so-called critical race theory from public education without saying how the federal government would accomplish that. (Elementary and secondary education curricula are typically set at the state and local level, not by the federal government.)

“The noxious tenets of critical race theory and gender ideology should be excised from curriculum in every single public school in this country,” Sullivan says. (Reached by phone, Sullivan told ProPublica to contact her press representative and hung up. A representative did not respond.)

In a different video, David Burton, an economic policy expert at the Heritage Foundation, discusses the importance of an obscure yet influential agency called the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The Trump administration used OIRA to help roll back regulations on economic, fiscal and environmental issues. Under Biden, OIRA took a more aggressive stance in helping review and shape new regulations, which included efforts to combat housing discrimination, ban the sale of so-called ghost guns and set new renewable fuel targets.

Burton, in the Project 2025 video, urges future political appointees to work in OIRA and argues that the office should “increase its staffing levels considerably” in service of the conservative goal of reining in the so-called administrative state, namely the federal agencies that craft and issue new regulations.

“Fifty people are not enough to adequately police the regulatory actions of the entire federal government,” Burton says. “OIRA is one of the few government agencies that limits the regulatory ambitions of other agencies.” (Burton confirmed in a brief interview that he appeared in the video and endorsed expanding OIRA’s staffing levels.)

Expanding the federal workforce — even an office tasked with scrutinizing regulations — would seem to cut against the conservative movement’s long-standing goal of shrinking government. For anyone confused by Project 2025’s insistence that a conservative president should fill all appointee slots and potentially grow certain functions, Spencer Chretien, a former Trump White House aide who is now Project 2025’s associate director, addresses the tension in one video.

“Some on the right even say that we, because we believe in small government, should just lead by example and not fill certain political positions,” Chretien says. “I suggest that it would be almost impossible to bring any conservative change to America if the president did that.”