Documents show organization’s staffing initiative is going strong as it seeks to replace government employees.

Newly leaked training videos confirm how the staffing initiative of Project 2025, the controversial rightwing plan for the next Republican presidency, is gearing up for a major effort to replace non-partisan civil servants with conservative loyalists, and is being led by many former Trump administration officials.

The videos, created for Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy and published over the weekend by ProPublica and Documented, expose part of the Heritage Foundation thinktank’s plan to recruit and train political appointees on behalf of a future conservative administration.

A major aim of Project 2025 – running alongside its controversial policy proposals – is to replace thousands of government employees, most of whom work in career positions for administrations on both sides of the political aisle, with partisan Republican loyalists.

Of the 36 featured speakers, 29 previously worked for former US president Donald Trump in some capacity.

The videos appear to have been recorded before the resignation of the group’s director two weeks ago, reportedly due to “pressure from Trump campaign leadership”. Trump has recently attempted to distance himself from Project 2025 amid intense criticism and backlash regarding the group’s extreme policy proposals. As well as calling for the replacement of civil servants with Trump loyalists, those plans include eliminating the education department, shrinking environmental protections, and reducing LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights.

In the 23 training videos, totaling more than 14 hours, former Trump administration officials gave advice to future appointees on governing and how to best advance their conservative policies.

In one video, Rick Dearborn, who was a part of Trump’s 2016 transition team and served in the Trump White House as deputy chief of staff, admitted that during the Trump administration it was “tough” to fill all the positions at first.

The recruiting and training that Project 2025 is doing right now, Dearborn said, is “going to be so important to the next president, because 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” is a “luxury” that the Trump administration did not have in 2016.

In another video, Bethany Kozma, the former deputy chief of staff at the US Agency for International Development during the the Trump administration, said that the climate change movement is part of a goal by the government to “control people”.

“If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere,” Kozma said. The training video was titled “Left-Wing Code Words and Language.”

Read more at The Guardian.