\n<\/p>\n
In 2024,<\/span> as Donald Trump\u2019s reelection campaign gathered steam, the Heritage Foundation\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The application<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n One of the people who filled the form out entered a name that would echo through the first six months of Trump\u2019s new term: Paul Ingrassia.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Ingrassia is set to land a powerful job as head of the Justice Department\u2019s Office of Special Counsel.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n Now, pending a Senate hearing this week, Ingrassia is set to land a powerful job as head of the Justice Department\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n For Ingrassia\u2019s critics, he would be just the wrong person to lead OSC. <\/p>\n The Project 2025 questionnaire answers given under Ingrassia\u2019s name would appear to bolster the case that the applicant\u2019s primary concern is loyalty to Trump and sharp-elbowed partisan politics. The responses include allusions to severely cutting down federal agencies because of their \u201ctoxic ideologies\u201d; halting immigration; and imposing a new test for voting. (Ingrassia did not respond to a request for comment.)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n A leaked dataset<\/a> 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<\/a> showed that more than 13,000 people had filled out the applications. (Heritage did not respond to a request for comment.)<\/p>\n 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\u2019s information.<\/p>\n On July 24, Ingrassia will face a confirmation hearing in the Senate \u2014 and good government groups are opposing his bid.<\/p>\n \u201cAs head of OSC, the special counsel should be someone who respects federal workers, who will treat them fairly and without bias,\u201d a group of 24 civil society groups led by the Project on Government Oversight <\/a>wrote in an open letter<\/a> to Senators opposing Ingrassia\u2019s nomination. \u201cThe special counsel must be a person who will exercise their duties in a nonpartisan manner, a person of honesty and integrity who has the necessary experience to fulfill such an important role.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cPaul Ingrassia is none of these.\u201d<\/p>\n Ingrassia has advocated<\/a> for the arrest<\/a> of the president\u2019s political enemies, said<\/a> that Democrats are a threat to democracy, and labeled Republicans who disagree with him as RINOs \u2014 a derisive acronym meaning \u201cRepublicans in Name Only.\u201d<\/p>\n In the Project 2025 questionnaire filled out under the name Paul Ingrassia, the respondent agreed that \u201cthe President should be able to advance his\/her agenda through the bureaucracy without hinderance from unelected federal officials.\u201d<\/p>\n A response to a prompt about which political issue he was most passionate about and why included a long list of pet projects.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m passionate about restructuring the administrative state, condensing the size and scope of the various bureaucratic agencies, defunding many of them, given how destructive they and their toxic ideologies have been on the American way of life; reform and shut down many of the intelligence agencies; fully upend the justice department; reform the courts; redesign Washington, D.C., and build an even better city in its wake,\u201d the Project 2025 applicant wrote.<\/p>\n <\/p>\nThe Questionnaire<\/h2>\n