by Andy Kroll, ProPublica, and Nick Surgey, Documented

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ProPublica and Documented obtained more than 14 hours of never-before-published videos from Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy, which are intended to train the next conservative administration’s political appointees “to be ready on day one.”

Project 2025, the controversial playbook and policy agenda created by the Heritage Foundation and its allies for a future conservative presidential administration, has lost its director. In recent weeks, it faced scathing criticism from both Democratic groups and former President Donald Trump, whose campaign has tried to distance itself from the effort.

But Project 2025’s plan to train an army of political appointees who could battle against the so-called deep state government bureaucracy remains on track. Video trainings like these are one of the “four pillars” of that plan, says Spencer Chretien, the associate director of Project 2025, in “Political Appointees & The Federal Workforce.”

For transparency, we are publishing the videos as we obtained them.

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, said, “As our campaign leadership and President Trump have repeatedly stated, Agenda 47 is the only official policy agenda from our campaign.”

In “Conserving America,” Matthew Spalding, a vice president at Hillsdale College, sets out the landscape for the Presidential Administration Academy by talking about common conservative principles.

Hillsdale College is a small, Christian liberal arts school in Michigan known both for its great books curriculum, which is centered on reading the classics of the Western canon, and for having been a feeder of staffers for the Trump administration.

In “The History of the Conservative Movement,” Christopher Malagisi, the executive director of outreach for Hillsdale College’s Washington, D.C., campus, gives a history that spans from the early-20th century Progressive Era to the 1964 defeat of Barry Goldwater and the “Reagan revolution.”

In “Why Your Service Matters: How Presidential Appointees at All Levels Impact Policy,” three Heritage Foundation experts discuss the role that political appointees play in making policy.

They talk about the importance of planning ahead to “hit the ground running” and call the first 100 days of an administration a “honeymoon period” for policy implementation.

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