Unscrubbed PDFs Reveal Authors of Trump Memos Are Project 2025 Heavy Hitters

A U.S. tech researcher on Tuesday revealed that the authors of policies published by Republican President Donald Trump's Office of Personnel Management have links to the far-right Heritage Foundation and its most infamous initiative, Project 2025.

On her [citation needed] website, Molly White exposed Noah Peters as the true author of Office of Personnel Management (OPM) acting Director Charles Ezell's Tuesday memo providing guidance on policy strikingly similar to Schedule F—which White described as "an effort to enable Trump to purge civil servants and replace them with loyalists."

White also revealed that James Sherk wrote a pair of joint OMP/Office of Management and Budget memos forcing federal workers to return to in-person work and implementing a government-wide hiring freeze.

According to White:

As far back as 2023, the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 was recommending Peters for a position in Trump's second administration. Peters had previously been appointed in 2019 as the solicitor at the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA), where he "aided and defended Trump appointees' anti-union FLRA policies that went against decades of the agency's own precedents," according to Court Accountability Action and State Democracy Defenders Action. Peters returned to private practice in 2022, but recently quietly updated his LinkedIn profile to reflect a new title of "senior adviser" to the Office of Personnel Management. This appointment does not appear to have been announced anywhere else...

James Sherk was announced as assistant to the president for domestic policy on January 18. A White House official during Trump's first term, Sherk was a key figure in Trump's Schedule F endeavors. After [former Democratic President Joe] Biden was elected and he quickly repealed Schedule F, Sherk slunk off to the America First Policy Institute to continue efforts to advance Trump's policies. Prior to these positions, he was a staff member at the Heritage Foundation.

White pointed to an unverified Reddit post by someone claiming to be an OPM employee and federal worker for nearly 20 years as cause for alarm.

"I've never witnessed anything even remotely close to what's happening right now," the poster wrote. "In short, there's a hostile takeover of the civil service."

"Let me say this in no uncertain terms—OPM has been compromised and taken over... by outside politicals," the Reddit user continued. "In just five days, they managed to push aside dozens of nonpolitical, career civil servants who were there specifically to prevent the civil service from becoming the president's henchmen."

"The nonpolitical civil servants here at OPM are watching helplessly as our government is being systematically dismantled bit by bit," the poster warned. Even the [inspector generals] are being fired to prevent them from investigating the numerous whistleblower complaints we've filed."

Returning to the memos written by Peters and Sherk, White noted: "While Project 2025 and similar initiatives have been public about their plans to reshape the federal workforce, Trump and other figures in his administration have denied or downplayed links with the initiative. These documents provide further evidence that the implementation is already well underway, with designated personnel quietly drafting policies that were intended only to be publicly attributed to those in charge of the federal agencies."

At least 140 people who worked in Trump's first administration—including six former Cabinet secretaries—have been involved with Project 2025.

On Monday, the National Treasury Employees Union—which represents approximately 150,000 workers across 35 federal agencies—sued the Trump administration over its moves to politicize the civil service and disempower employees.