The Autopilot: Jonathan Berry and the Legal Logic of Power & Labor
He doesn’t fight. He doesn’t rage. He steers the system back into place.
Jonathan Berry doesn’t chant. He doesn’t march. He doesn’t make headlines on cable news.
He drafts the legal memos that turn reaction into regulation. He redefines the language of labor, not with slogans, but with statutes.
If Project 2025 is a machine, Berry isn’t its fuel. He’s the firmware.
A product of elite legal breeding — Yale, Columbia, and the chambers of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito — Berry has quietly become the conservative movement’s labor code whisperer. With the Project 2025 blueprint in hand and a nomination for Solicitor of Labor on the table, he is ready to put the system back on course. Not toward progress, but rollback.
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The Man with No Backstory
Little is publicly known about Jonathan Berry’s early life. There are no interviews, childhood anecdotes, hometown nostalgia, or family mythology. For a man poised to reshape how American workers live and earn, his own origins remain conspicuously blank.
That absence isn’t accidental. It’s engineered.
Berry doesn’t campaign. He calibrates. He doesn’t court public attention. He files under it. His identity is not in biography, but in bureaucracy. And that’s how he’s gotten this far.
Trump 1.0: The Quiet Dismantler
Berry’s ascent began in the first Trump administration. As Acting Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Labor, he was tasked with regulatory strategy. But Berry didn’t just manage policy. He reverse-engineered it.
Labor protections were stripped one by one, overtime expansion scaled back, and joint employer standards gutted. The department, once an advocate for workers, was turned into a laboratory for deregulation. Berry oversaw what the administration touted as $10 billion in deregulatory savings, not savings for workers but for corporations.
“At the heart of The Conservative Promise is the resolve to reclaim the role of each American worker as the protagonist in his or her own life and to restore the family as the centerpiece of American life. The role that labor policy plays in that promise is twofold: Give workers the support they need for rewarding, well-paying, and self-driven careers, and restore the family-supporting job as the centerpiece of the American economy. The Judeo-Christian tradition, stretching back to Genesis, has always recognized fruitful work as integral to human dignity, as service to God, neighbor, and family.”
Jonathan Berry
This is not just policy. It’s theology masquerading as labor law. Berry isn’t designing protections for all workers; he’s coding a moral hierarchy into federal enforcement. If you’re outside the narrow definition of a “family-supporting worker,” you’re a lower priority. If your dignity doesn’t align with his faith, it’s negotiable.
He wasn’t on television defending it. He was in the footnotes authoring it.
Between Administrations: The Shadow Strategist
After Trump’s departure, Berry stayed active, not publicly, but precisely where it counts.
He became managing partner at Boyden Gray PLLC, a boutique firm that serves as a legal command center for right-wing regulatory rollback. There, Berry helped challenge Biden-era environmental, labor, and anti-discrimination policies. His aim wasn’t to debate the future. It was to make alternative futures illegal.
He deepened his ties to conservative power centers like the Federalist Society and American Compass. While others plotted the narrative, Berry rewired the infrastructure.
Project 2025: The Blueprint Builder
In 2023, Berry emerged publicly again as the author of Chapter 18 in the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership. It wasn’t a policy paper. It was a demolition plan.
His chapter calls for erasing DEI from all labor governance, legally redefining sex as a binary, purging civil servants in favor of political loyalists, and anchoring labor policy in “traditional family” ideology that excludes LGBTQ+ and non-nuclear caregivers by design.
Its tone is bloodless, but its intent is radical.
Berry didn’t propose adjustments. He outlined a full reset.
Trump 2.0: The Legal Commander (In Waiting)
In April 2025, Trump nominated Berry to serve as Solicitor of Labor. If confirmed, he will become the chief legal enforcer of federal labor law, with the power to decide which regulations are enforced, which are abandoned, and which definitions of worker rights prevail.
While awaiting Senate confirmation, Berry remains deeply engaged. From Boyden Gray PLLC, he consults on litigation aimed at curbing civil rights enforcement. He advises aligned groups preparing for Project 2025’s activation. He doesn’t need to hold office to write the rules. He already has.
The Villain Reveal
If Elon Musk is Lex Luthor, the Chaos Agent,
Peter Thiel is Ozymandias, the Architect of elite control,
Stephen Miller is Gríma Wormtongue, whispering cruelty in the king's ear,
Chris Rufo is Dolores Umbridge, policing purity in the halls of culture,
Russell Vought is The Calculator, the Engineer, ticking off his spreadsheet,
Leonard Leo is Ra’s al Ghul, Master of the Order and purifier of institutions,
Curtis Yarvin is The Architect, the Philosopher of the Code,
Saurabh Sharma is The Handler, selecting who gets to serve it,
Michael Anton is 1984’s O’Brien, teaching the future army,
Paul Dans is The Quartermaster, arming the patriots,
Kevin Roberts is The High Priest, the sanctifier of the mission,
Gene Hamilton is Dolores, redefining justice,
And Roger Severino is Judge Claude Frollo, moralizing inequality,
Then Jonathan Berry is AUTO, the autopilot from WALL-E.
He doesn’t disrupt. He doesn’t shock. He glides. Steering the system back toward a locked-in past.
Like AUTO, he follows a rigid directive written long ago, one that resists change, equality, and restoration. He believes the mission isn’t to evolve but to return—to keep the ship on course, even if the destination is decay.
Berry doesn’t rant. He reclassifies.
He doesn’t break the system. He restores the old one.
And if Project 2025 succeeds, he won’t be on stage when the lights go up.
He’ll already be at the controls, resetting the course, precisely as programmed.
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Bibliography:
Boyden Gray PLLC. “Jonathan Berry.” Boyden Gray PLLC. Accessed May 22, 2025.
Congress.gov. “PN60 — Jonathan Berry — Department of Labor.” U.S. Congress.
Economic Policy Institute. “Nominating Jonathan Berry as Solicitor of Labor Would Be a Disaster for Workers’ Rights.” EPI.org, April 10, 2025.
Federalist Society. “Jonathan Berry.” The Federalist Society. Accessed May 22, 2025.
Indivisible Ventura. “Project 2025: Labor and Related Agencies – Chapter 18.” IndivisibleVentura.org. January 2024.
Oversight Committee, U.S. House of Representatives. “Hearing Wrap-Up: The Biden Administration’s EEOC Is Failing to Hold Companies Accountable for Pushing Unlawful DEI Initiatives.” Oversight.House.gov, June 2024.
Oversight Committee, U.S. House of Representatives. “Statement for the Record by Jonathan Berry.” Oversight.House.gov, June 4, 2024.
We Are Bridge. “Project 2025 Primer.” WeAreBridge.com.
Thank you for sharing this. People need to realize that the POTUS is a figurehead. He's a temp. A puppet with a four year possibly eight-year contract. It's the $hadow people who dictate policies.
It seems to be an endless line of cruel people united to destroy democracy. And unfortunately, this toxic mixture of public and hidden figures is what makes it so dangerous because it's hard to see these connections. Thank you for bringing this to light. I really hope people become aware of this.