The Presidential Personnel Office, which is responsible for recruiting and vetting political appointees, will count its deputy director as Trent Morse, the people said. Morse is a former senior associate at Ballard Partners, the GOP-aligned lobbying firm where he worked on behalf of dozens of clients between 2021 and 2022, lobbying disclosures show.

Morse took a job in 2023 as chief of external affairs and GOP outreach for the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, according to his LinkedIn account. He was also brought on that year as a senior vice president at Mercury Public Affairs, a bipartisan firm that also has close ties to the Trump administration, including via White House chief of staff Susie Wiles’s prior co-chairwoman role there.

The hiring of Morse further illustrates Ballard’s deepening connections to the Trump administration. Ballard, the firm of Trump fundraiser Brian Ballard, is signing up a slew of corporate clients angling for influence post-election. The firm employs Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general pick, and Wiles also used to work there.

In 2022, Morse’s clients at Ballard included Millennium Physician Group, Martin County, Florida, the Jacksonville Port Authority, the City of Jacksonville, Florida, and others, according to disclosures.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

The PPO is being led by Sergio Gor, the president and co-founder of Donald Trump Jr.’s publishing company, Winning Team Publishing, the New York Times reported. Saurabh Sharma, the former president of a Trump-aligned group called American Moment that is helping to staff the Trump administration, also landed a role at the PPO. Sharma declined to comment.

Morse worked at various agencies during the first Trump term, including the Department of Transportation, the White House, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of Health and Human Services. In 2018, he replaced HHS official Tim Clark after a Politico report on Clark sharing conspiracy theories on his social media account about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Ballard Partners, Morse’s prior employer, has forged powerful relationships with incoming Trump administration officials. It recently signed Harvard University to lobby and represents corporations that directed millions of dollars to Trump’s inauguration committee, such as Ripple and Amazon.

On his first day in office, Trump’s PPO hired more than 1,300 staff, according to the New York Post.

The Washington Examiner reached out for comment to Ballard Partners and Morse.