Some of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) memos sent to federal workers about firing, hiring freezes, and mandatory return to office demands were seemingly written by people who were previously employed by the Heritage Foundation and other conservative think tanks with longstanding loyalties to President Donald Trump, according to metadata on the memos posted by the government online. We know this because the senders of the memos failed to scrub the metadata from those documents, making it easy for anyone to reveal the listed authors of the memos.
The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, better known as Project 2025, is a right-wing agenda from the Heritage Foundation that lays out the blueprint for remaking the federal government by firing government workers to install conservative, right-wing figures. The priorities of its authors include restricting access to reproductive care, mass deportations, and firing civil servants to replace them with Trump loyalists.
Memos to federal Chief Human Capital Officers, HR Directors and Heads of Agencies are available publicly on the CHCO website. The memo author metadata was spotted by someone on Reddit’s r/fednews community, in response to a federal worker’s post.