OPM 'scrambled to scrub' metadata from memos containing reported Project 2025 links

28 January

During the 2024 U.S. presidential race, now-President Donald Trump made a concerted effort to distance himself from Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation's 922-page blueprint for a second Trump presidency. Trump reportedly viewed Project 2025 as a major political liability, claiming he had nothing to do with it even though its architects were major allies.

Democratic nominee Kamala Harris hammered Trump aggressively on Project 2025, and her website even had an entire section devoted to the Heritage document and its proposals. Harris, in an October 14, 2024 post on X, formerly Twitter, wrote, "Donald Trump’s Project 2025 Agenda would give him unchecked power to act on his worst instincts — and there will be no one to stop him."

Regardless, Trump narrowly won the election, returning to the White House on January 20, 2025. And according to reporting from 404 Media, some memos from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) "were seemingly written by people" with Project 2025 connections. But the OPM, Mediaite's David Gilmour reports, "scrambled to scrub" those memos.

404 Media's Samanta Cole, in an article published on January 27, reported, "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."

But Gilmour, in an article published on January 28, reports that the OPM "scrambled to scrub" the memos "after initial publication of the documents contained metadata revealing they were authored by individuals tied to Project 2025."

"The metadata revealed the authors' identities as individuals affiliated with the Heritage Foundation think tank's Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for reshaping federal governance, according to 404 Media," Gilmour explains. "One memo, titled 'Guidance on Presidential Memorandum Return to In-Person Work' and dated January 24, listed its author as Noah Peters, a senior advisor at OPM and former Trump appointee who served as solicitor for the Federal Labor Relations Authority during Trump's first term."

Gilmour adds, "Another memo, 'Federal Civilian Hiring Freeze Guidance,' was authored by James Sherk, who 404 Media highlights as an architect of the Trump Administration's Schedule F classification, which stripped employment protections from federal workers."

Sherk, according to Gilmour, was "formerly" active in the Heritage Foundation.

"Despite Trump's public denials of involvement with Project 2025 and distancing from the blueprint," Gilmour reports, "the metadata leak is the latest evidence of how he has tapped its contributors for high-ranking roles. Although the OPM deleted the initial documents before uploading amended ones, tech industry researcher Molly White has hosted the original memos on her website in full."

White, on January 27, noted, "The OPM has since scrubbed the PDF metadata. However, the archived copies linked in the post contain the original metadata."

Read Mediaite's full article at this link and reporting from 404 Media here.

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