Conservatives have always dreamed of “draining the swamp” in Washington, D.C., and getting rid of the “Deep State.” Their dream is finally being realized.

But it seems that the compass has malfunctioned. The swamp being drained is a literal one, Florida, which is 31 percent swampland covering 1.5 million acres — the most of any state in the continental United States. It is from there that President-elect Donald Trump, himself a resident, has been selecting some nominees for his Cabinet and appointees to head departments. Several news outlets have been keeping track of the names of those whom Trump wants to help him run the world’s most powerful nation with a divisive agenda – at least a dozen of them, especially in the health field.

It began with Trump’s naming Matt Gaetz, the congressional representative for Pensacola, as attorney general. He withdrew amidst persistent allegations that he had sex with an underage girl and took part in drugs and sex binges — which he denies.

Trump replaced Gaetz with Florida’s former attorney general Pam Bondi of the Tampa suburb of Temple Terrace. Newsweek reported that Trump had donated $25,000 to a political group supporting Bondi while her office was considering complaints that his Trump University was a scam. No charges were filed.

Dr, Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford Medical School health policy professor and DeSantis advisor during the COVID-19 pandemic, will be director of the National Institutes of Health. The Orlando Sentinel reported that he co-signed the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020 which advocated that “those who are at minimal risk of death” from the disease should “live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.” Eighty researchers deemed herd immunity “a dangerous fallacy.”

Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, who has Jordanian parentage and is a University of South Florida graduate who grew up in Umatilla in Lake County, will become the U.S. Surgeon General. Mehmet Oz – Dr. Oz – who the new administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, owns a mansion in Palm Bech and a cattle farm in Okeechobee, along with other business interests in the state, Business Insider reported. David Weldon, who moved to Indialantic in Brevard County after serving as a U.S. Army doctor, will be director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, of Miami, is the Secretary of State-designate. He vied with Trump for the Republican nomination in 2016, when they exchanged acrimonious remarks about each other.

Mike Waltz, Nesheiwat’s husband, a decorated Green Beret combat veteran and a Congressman representing the St. Augustine area, will become National Security Advisor. Susan Wiles of Jacksonville, a former DeSantis political consultant, will become the first woman chief of staff to a president. Mike Huckabee, an arch-conservative and evangelical stalwart and former governor of Arkansas, who spent almost a decade in Walton County and, Florida Politics reported, once considered running for Florida governor, will be ambassador to Israel. Todd Blanche, who recently bought a home in Palm Beach County, has been named Deputy Attorney General.

Anthony “Tony” Salisbury, special agent in charge of the Homeland Security Investigations office in Miami, will become Deputy Homeland Security Advisor in the White House, The Miami Herald reported. He will be an advisor to Stephen Miller, who has been named a Deputy Chief of Staff and who was the architect of Trump’s harsh anti-immigration policies in his first administration.

But another Floridian, Hillsboro County Sheriff Chad Chronister, chosen to head the Drug Enforcement Administration, withdrew his name three days later, citing the “gravity” of the job. Reports have indicated that Chronister‘s track record in his 30-year law enforcement career does not quite fit into the Trump mold.

Chronister actively enforced COVID19 regulations, including arresting Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne of the River at Tampa Bay Church in March 2020 for disregarding COVID-19 lockdown orders. He has also stated that he does not believe law enforcement officers have a role in immigration enforcement.

Chronister has a link to Trump. The New York Times reported that his father-in-law, Edward J. DeBartolo Jr., former owner of the San Francisco 49ers NFL team, pleaded guilty in 1998 in connection with an extortion plot. DeBartolo donated to Trump’s presidential campaign and received a pardon from him in 2020.

But there is another wrinkle to the Florida connection: the 30-chapter, 920-page Project 2025 – Mandate for Change.

Gov. Ron DeSantis and “some of his specific policies are mentioned by name in the document multiple times and many of the recurrent themes are ones that DeSantis has championed in Florida,” USA TODAY Network reported. Those “themes” include “protecting” parental rights, banning schools from discussing gender issues and race, expanding school vouchers, ending diversity-equity-inclusion (DEI) programs, squeezing labor unions and downgrading climate change as a priority.

The non-profit progressive group Florida Rising Together says on its website that Project 2025 proposals have already been tried out in the state and that 120 bills based on those proposals were filed in the Legislature, including what it dubbed the “Dirty Dozen,” among which are those which USA TODAY Network mentioned, along with housing, labor, voting rights, abortion rights, gun control, and criminal justice.

Those laws, Florida Rising Together claims, have, in four years, led to state policies which “drove up the cost of housing and groceries, exacerbated the impact of climate change, diminished the quality of employment opportunities, decreased diversity and inclusion initiatives, and ultimately attacked the freedoms of all Floridians working to provide a good life for our families while concentrating the wealth we create into the hands of a few corporate elites.” Those policies, “have made Florida the staging ground for what will become Project 2025’s national strategy …” That is the view also of Nikki Fried, Florida’s Democratic Party chairwoman, who told USA TODAY NETWORK, “We have been the lab rats for the Heritage Foundation here in the state of Florida.”

This is not the first time that the Washington, D.C.-based Heritage Foundation has produced a blueprint for governing. In January 1980, it offered up “Mandate for Leadership: Policy Management in a Conservative Administration.” That 20-volume, 3,000-page publication listed more than 2,000 ideas on how to use presidential power to swing the nation rightward.

That was during Reagan’s presidency and the mandate stalled because he was evidently not as radically conservative as had been assumed. Trump will likely implement the slimmed-down version as he surrounds himself with committed ideologues,

They include Russ Vought, named director of the Office of Management and Budget; Tom Holman, tapped for “Border Czar;” and Brendan Carr, selected to head the Federal Communications Commission.

Christopher Rufo, sometimes described as a “rightwing provocateur,” who is a frontline warrior in DeSantis’ cultural war and has found a home in Florida, is likely to play a leading role. He was invited to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate to “present the president-elect’s team with a plan to geld American universities by withholding money if they do not pull back on diversity measures,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

Trump has publicly disavowed knowing about Project 2025 and its more than 100 architects — many of whom served in his first administration. But MSNBC obtained a recording of a speech which he made at a Heritage Foundation gathering in 2022 in which he said, “This is a great group and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”

Ironically, DeSantis evidently allowed Florida to be used as a laboratory for Project 2025 ideas to burnish his credentials for a presidential run in 2024 and lost to Trump. Ionically, while his lab work has been a success, it is Trump who will benefit. However, if Minneapolis-born Pete Hesketh is discarded as Defense Secretary-nominee over allegations of “financial mismanagement and sexual impropriety,” there may yet be a role for the governor in Washington, the proverbial swamp.