MEMO: Trump Prioritizes Loyalty and Extremism With Unfit Cabinet Nominations

TO: Interested Parties

FROM: Congressional Integrity Project 

RE: Trump Prioritizes Loyalty and Extremism With Unfit Cabinet Nominations

DATE: January 15, 2025

Donald Trump’s slate of extreme cabinet nominees – including Kristi Noem, Pete Hegseth, and Russ Vought – underscores the President-elect’s commitment to prioritizing blind loyalty to a far-right agenda over a government that serves its citizens.

This week, these nominees will have to answer for their records to the Senate and to the American people. While they may try to rewrite the past, here are key facts about the nominees that are crucial to understanding the grave threat that Trump’s allies pose to our democracy.

Pete Hegseth, Department of Defense

Trump Department of Defense Nominee Pete Hegseth has repeatedly pledged to purge political opponents from the military and supports turning the military on domestic political targets, including protestors.

• Hegseth has suggested that he will purge high-level military officials whose political beliefs he disagrees with, producing widespread worry within the defense community about his apparent willingness to politicize the U.S. military to fight “woke” beliefs.

• Hegseth has advocated for weaponizing the military against those with different political beliefs, including calling for deploying the military against Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Hegseth also refused to condemn white supremacists as the culprit behind the 2017 Charlottesville terrorist attack, instead praising Donald Trump for “[condemning] hatred and bigotry on all sides.”

Kristi Noem (Department of Homeland Security)

Department of Homeland Security nominee Kristi Noem has a long history of attacking Native American groups and non-profits.  Noem is nominated to take charge of the nation’s cybersecurity apparatus and is a Trump loyalist who was one of the biggest proponents of lies about the 2020 election.

• Kristi Noem attacked a Native-led nonprofit as “dangerous” and “anti-American.”  In a 2023 appearance on Fox & Friends Kristi Noem attacked Target for donations it made to a Native-led nonprofit and said the company was fundamentally tearing down America. Noem called for a boycott of Target because of  donations to NDN Collective, a social justice organization in Rapid City that calls for returning the Black Hills to the Lakota. Noem said the group is “anti-American” and “a very extreme organization that’s raising these dollars from nonprofits such as Target and going forward and buying land and using it to infiltrate our American way of life and our value system.”  Noem is currently banned from most tribal lands in South Dakota because of her antipathy towards Native Americans.

• Noem has long been one of Donald Trump’s closest allies and she embraced all of his conspiracy theories about a “rigged” election in 2020, including joining the Texas lawsuit seeking to throw out the votes in four swing states. Noem is also closely allied with election conspiracy theorist and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.  Lindell held his “Cyber Symposium” of conspiracy theorists in Sioux Falls in August 2021 where he claimed he would reveal proof that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Noem traveled on Lindell’s private plane on several occasions, including to an RGA meeting in Florida where Lindell was ejected for confronting Arizona Governor Doug Ducey and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp with false allegations about voter fraud in their states.

Pam Bondi (Attorney General) 

Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi has years of legal experience defending Trump by suing progressive-leaning nonprofits and is already mired in ethical quagmires.

• Bondi led a MAGA law firm that sued dozens of nonprofits Trump disagreed with. Pam Bondi led America First Legal, a firm founded to challenge the 2020 election that has backed Trump’s legal agenda ever since. America First Legal has launched dozens of lawsuits against nonprofits supporting causes ranging from pro-Palestinian protestors to democracy groups exposing Trump’s election denial falsehoods.

• During her time as Attorney General of Florida, Pam Bondi was involved in at least two significant ethics scandals. During her 2010 campaign for Florida Attorney General, Pam Bondi took thousands of dollars in campaign cash from a company called Lender Processing Services (and its affiliates) that was being investigated by the state for operating a purported “foreclosure mill” that used bad paperwork to foreclose on Floridians’ homes. Just a few months after Bondi took office, two of the leading attorneys on the case were fired and the investigation essentially ended. Separately, in 2013, Bondi declined to join a New York lawsuit or act on consumer complaints alleging fraud at Donald Trump’s “Trump University” after a $25,000 donation from a Trump entity to a PAC supporting Bondi’s re-election campaign.

John Ratcliffe (CIA)

Trump’s nominee to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe is a Project 2025 contributor who has politicized intelligence to score political points and attack Democrats.

• While serving as Director National Intelligence during Trump’s first term, John Ratcliffe approved selective declassifications of intelligence to score political points, left Democratic lawmakers out of briefings, accused congressional opponents of leaks, offered Republican operatives top spots on his staff and made public assertions that contradicted professional intelligence assessments.  Most concerning to intelligence officials at the CIA and NSA was Ratcliffe’s decision to release unverified intelligence on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign that may have been Russian disinformation.

• Ratcliffe is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and was a contributor to Project 2025, with the agenda’s chapter on the intelligence community citing an interview with Ratcliffe about working in the first administration.

Russel Vought (OMB)

As head of OMB Russel Vought has been nominated to serve as Donald Trump’s “tip of the spear” for attacks on the federal workforce and civil society.  Vought was the author of Project 2025’s blueprint for weaponizing the executive office of the president and is seeking an “army of investigators” to target Trump’s enemies within and outside of the federal government.

• Vought was the author of Project 2025’s chapter on the executive office of the president, which he has said will be “a new governing consensus of the Republican Party.”  Vought argues that protocols intended to shield criminal cases from political influence have allowed unelected prosecutors to abuse their power and wants to give the president direct control over the Justice Department. “Department of Justice is not an independent agency,”  Vought told a Heritage Foundation event in 2023. Just like Donald Trump, Vought supports prosecuting officials who investigated the president and his allies. “It can’t just be hearings,” he told Charlie Kirk on his podcast. “It has to be investigations, an army of investigators that lead to firm convictions.”

• Vought has plans to use the military to shut down domestic protests.  In a 2024 speech about the Project 2025 agenda, Vought laid out how his think tank, the Center for Renewing America, crafted the legal rationale for invoking the Insurrection Act, giving the president broad power to use the military for domestic law enforcement.  “We want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defense community come in and say, ‘That’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do,”  he said.

• Vought is allied with numerous far right figures. Center for Renewing America hired Jeffrey Clark, who faced criminal charges for working to overturn the 2020 election, as its Director of Litigation. The group also named Steve Friend, a disgraced former FBI agent and January 6 conspiracy theorist, as a fellow on Domestic Intelligence and Security Services. Vought has “a close affiliation” with William Wolfe, a far-right Christian Nationalist figure who says Christians may soon need to “heed the call to arms.” Vought has said groups designated as hate or extremist organizations by the Southern Poverty Law Center are actually “effective groups who love America.”

Doug Burgum (Interior) 

Department of Interior Nominee Doug Burgum is an election denier and an unquestioning Trump loyalist

• Doug Burgum has echoed Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, claiming that there were unspecified “irregularities.” He continued pushing the big lie years later and refused to commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election, instead telling reporters, “People should be held accountable for their actions.” Above all, Burgum is a Trump loyalist who pledged to support Trump regardless of his conviction or involvement in the January 6 insurrection.

Lee Zeldin (EPA)

Lee Zeldin, Trump’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency knows little about the environment, but a lot about defending Donald Trump.

• Lee Zeldin served in the House of Representatives from 2015 to 2023 where he was primarily known for his strong support of Israel and his work on veterans issues, demonstrating very little interest in environmental issues or policy during his tenure.  Zeldin’s primary qualification for the position of EPA administrator appears to be his loyalty to Donald Trump. Zeldin embraced Trump beginning early in 2016, and was one of Trump’s loudest defenders during his impeachment trial. He was a key figure in the plot to overturn the 2020 election and a major surrogate for Trump during the 2024 campaign.

Scott Bessent (Treasury) 

Treasury Secretary nominee Scott Bessent is a Trump loyalist who could use his authority to undermine nonpartisan institutions.

• Scott Bessent is an avid fundraiser for Trump and ardent supporter of his policy agenda. Bessent has already voiced plans to consolidate power and use his authority to undermine nonpartisan institutions, musing about appointing a “shadow Fed chair.”  Trump’s nominee for Deputy Treasury, Michael Faulkender, is another loyalist who serves as chief economist at Trump’s America First Policy Institute think-tank, which was founded to overturn the 2020 election and has backed and authored Trump’s policy agenda ever since.