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.
“Whomever is posting the memos to the public OPM website doesn’t know how to scrub meta data from the documents,” they wrote. “If you download them and view the document properties, you can see the author. Several are authored by lobbyists and lawyers individuals outside of the OPM.”
A memo with the subject line “Guidance on Presidential Memorandum Return to In-Person Work” sent from Charles Ezell, acting director at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and dated January 24, was authored by a “Peters, Noah,” according to the file’s metadata. Peters is an attorney who represented white nationalist Jared Taylor who sued Twitter in 2018 for banning him (and lost). In 2021, Peters wrote about Kyle Rittenhouse (who brought an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle to a Black Lives Matter protest and killed two people), saying Rittenhouse should be able to “reap some measure of restitution now that he’s been acquitted” from the journalists who covered his case.
Peters’ LinkedIn now says he’s a “senior advisor” at the OPM. In Trump’s first term, he was announced by Trump appointee Colleen Duffy Kiko to be Solicitor for the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA).
A memo titled “Federal Civilian Hiring Freeze Guidance” and sent on Monday from Ezell and Matthew J. Vaeth, acting director at the Office of Management and Budget, was authored by a “James Sherk,” according to the metadata.
Sherk’s specialty is firing federal workers. He was “a special assistant on domestic policy during Trump’s first term,” according to Politico, and he worked at both the Heritage Foundation and the conservative think tank and Trump transition project America First Policy Institute before Trump brought him back to serve in the White House Domestic Policy Council. He’s credited as coming up with a classification for federal workers called Schedule F to remove their employment protections, which is recommended several times in Project 2025’s playbook.
On Friday, a memo sent from the OPM told federal agencies to terminate “to the maximum extent allowed by law, all federal diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility and ‘environmental justice’ offices and positions” within 60 days. Sherk has said that the federal government needs “more people who basically share the President’s policy agenda to carry it out effectively,” and firing workers acts as a threat to anyone who “wants [to] be a political activist on the job.”
Trump denied being involved with Project 2025 throughout his run for office, calling it “ridiculous and abysmal.” When he was elected president, he tapped several authors and contributors to the agenda to join his administration. In July, an investigation by CNN found at least 140 people who worked for Trump were involved in Project 2025.
