In 2024, as Donald Trump’s reelection campaign gathered steam, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 had its eye on staffing a new Republican administration. The initiative, which was designed around crafting an agenda for an incoming Trump White House, put out a call for aspiring administration officials.

The application, including multiple-choice questions and open-ended queries, sought to place would-be Trump apparatchiks on the political spectrum and suss out their political priorities.

One of the people who filled the form out entered a name that would echo through the first six months of Trump’s new term: Paul Ingrassia.

Now, pending a Senate hearing this week, Ingrassia is set to land a powerful job as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Counsel. Among other responsibilities related to the federal workforce, the office is supposed to protect whistleblowers and keep partisan politics out of the civil service.

For Ingrassia’s critics, he would be just the wrong person to lead OSC.

The Project 2025 questionnaire answers given under Ingrassia’s name would appear to bolster the case that the applicant’s primary concern is loyalty to Trump and sharp-elbowed partisan politics. The responses include allusions to severely cutting down federal agencies because of their “toxic ideologies”; halting immigration; and imposing a new test for voting. (Ingrassia did not respond to a request for comment.)

A leaked dataset of the Project 2025 application questionnaires was released in June by the group Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoSecrets. An analysis of the leaked data showed that more than 13,000 people had filled out the applications. (Heritage did not respond to a request for comment.)

DDoSecrets redacted the full entries for applicants but provided The Intercept with an unredacted version. The contact information and other personal data included in the Project 2025 file matched Paul Ingrassia’s........

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