[With a 1,000-page “Project 2025” handbook and an “army”
of Americans, the idea is to have the civic infrastructure in place on
Day One to commandeer, reshape and do away with the “deep state”
bureaucracy, firing 50,000 federal workers. ]
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CONSERVATIVE GROUPS DRAW UP PLAN TO DISMANTLE THE US GOVERNMENT AND
REPLACE IT WITH TRUMP’S VISION  
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Lisa Mascaro
August 29, 2023
AP News
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_ With a 1,000-page “Project 2025” handbook and an “army” of
Americans, the idea is to have the civic infrastructure in place on
Day One to commandeer, reshape and do away with the “deep state”
bureaucracy, firing 50,000 federal workers. _

Spencer Chretien, left, and Kristen Eichamer stand in the Project
2025 tent during the playing of the national anthem at the Iowa State
Fair, Aug. 14, 2023, in Des Moines. With more than a year to go before
the 2024 election , a constellation of conservative organizations is
preparing for a possible second White House term for Donald Trump. The
Project 2025 effort is being led by the Heritage Foundation think
tank. (AP Photo)

 

With more than a year to go before the 2024 election
[[link removed]], a constellation of
conservative organizations is preparing for a possible second White
House term
[[link removed]] for
Donald Trump, recruiting thousands of Americans to come to Washington
on a mission to dismantle the federal government and replace it with a
vision closer to his own.

Led by the long-established Heritage Foundation think tank and fueled
by former Trump [[link removed]] administration
officials, the far-reaching effort is essentially a
government-in-waiting for the former president’s return — or any
candidate who aligns with their ideals and can defeat President Joe
Biden [[link removed]] in 2024.

With a nearly 1,000-page “Project 2025” handbook and an “army”
of Americans, the idea is to have the civic infrastructure in place on
Day One to commandeer, reshape and do away with what Republicans
deride as the “deep state” bureaucracy, in part by firing as many
as 50,000 federal workers.

“We need to flood the zone with conservatives,” said Paul Dans,
director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project and a former
Trump administration official who speaks with historical flourish
about the undertaking.

“This is a clarion call to come to Washington,” he said. “People
need to lay down their tools, and step aside from their professional
life and say, ‘This is my lifetime moment to serve.’”

The unprecedented effort is being orchestrated with dozens of
right-flank organizations, many new to Washington, and represents a
changed approach from conservatives, who traditionally have sought to
limit the federal government by cutting federal taxes and slashing
federal spending
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Instead, Trump-era conservatives want to gut the “administrative
state” from within, by ousting federal employees they believe are
standing in the way of the president’s agenda and replacing them
with like-minded officials more eager to fulfill a new executive’s
approach to governing.

The goal is to avoid the pitfalls of Trump’s first years in office,
when the Republican president’s team was ill-prepared, his Cabinet
nominees had trouble winning Senate confirmation
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policies were met with resistance — by lawmakers, government workers
and even Trump’s own appointees who refused to bend
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break protocol, or in some cases violate laws, to achieve his goals.

While many of the Project 2025 proposals are inspired by Trump, they
are being echoed by GOP rivals
[[link removed]] Ron
DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy and are gaining prominence among other
Republicans.

And if Trump wins a second term, the work from the Heritage coalition
ensures the president will have the personnel to carry forward his
unfinished White House business.

“The president Day One will be a wrecking ball for the
administrative state,” said Russ Vought, a former Trump
administration official involved in the effort who is now president at
the conservative Center for Renewing America.

Much of the new president’s agenda would be accomplished by
reinstating what’s called Schedule F — a Trump-era executive order
that would reclassify tens of thousands of the 2 million federal
employees as essentially at-will workers who could more easily be
fired.

Biden had rescinded the executive order upon taking office in 2021,
but Trump — and other presidential hopefuls — now vow to reinstate
it.

“It frightens me,” said Mary Guy, a professor of public
administration at the University of Colorado Denver, who warns the
idea would bring a return to a political spoils system.

Experts argue Schedule F would create chaos in the civil service,
which was overhauled during President Jimmy Carter’s administration
in an attempt to ensure a professional workforce and end political
bias dating from 19th century patronage.

As it now stands, just 4,000 members of the federal workforce are
considered political appointees who typically change with each
administration. But Schedule F could put tens of thousands of career
professional jobs at risk.

“We have a democracy that is at risk of suicide. Schedule F is just
one more bullet in the gun,” Guy said.

The ideas contained in Heritage’s coffee table-ready book are both
ambitious and parochial, a mix of longstanding conservative policies
and stark, head-turning proposals that gained prominence in the Trump
era.

There’s a “top to bottom overhaul” of the Department of Justice,
particularly curbing its independence and ending FBI efforts to combat
the spread of misinformation. It calls for stepped-up prosecution of
anyone providing or distributing abortion pills by mail.

There are proposals to have the Pentagon “abolish” its recent
diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, what the project calls
the “woke” agenda, and reinstate service members discharged for
refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.

Chapter by chapter, the pages offer a how-to manual for the next
president, similar to one Heritage produced 50 years ago, ahead of the
Ronald Reagan administration. Authored by some of today’s most
prominent thinkers in the conservative movement, it’s often
sprinkled with apocalyptic language.

A chapter written by Trump’s former acting deputy secretary of
Homeland Security calls for bolstering the number of political
appointees, and redeploying office personnel with law enforcement
ability into the field “to maximize law enforcement capacity.”

At the White House, the book suggests the new administration should
“reexamine” the tradition of providing work space for the press
corps and ensure the White House counsel
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“deeply committed” to the president’s agenda.

Conservatives have long held a grim view of federal government
offices, complaining they are stacked with liberals intent on halting
Republican agendas.

But Doreen Greenwald, national president of the National Treasury
Employees Union, said most federal workers live in the states and are
your neighbors, family and friends. “Federal employees are not the
enemy,” she said.

While presidents typically rely on Congress to put policies into
place, the Heritage project leans into what legal scholars refer to as
a unitary view of executive power that suggests the president has
broad authority to act alone.

To push past senators who try to block presidential Cabinet nominees,
Project 2025 proposes installing top allies in acting administrative
roles, as was done during the Trump administration to bypass the
Senate confirmation process.

John McEntee, another former Trump official advising the effort, said
the next administration can “play hardball a little more than we did
with Congress.”

In fact, Congress would see its role diminished — for example, with
a proposal to eliminate congressional notification on certain foreign
arms sales.

Philip Wallach, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
who studies the separation of powers and was not part of the Heritage
project, said there’s a certain amount of “fantasizing” about
the president’s capabilities.

“Some of these visions, they do start to just bleed into some kind
of authoritarian fantasies where the president won the election, so
he’s in charge, so everyone has to do what he says — and that’s
just not the system the government we live under,” he said.

At the Heritage office, Dans has a faded photo on his wall of an
earlier era in Washington, with the White House situated almost alone
in the city, dirt streets in all directions.

It’s an image of what conservatives have long desired, a smaller
federal government.

The Heritage coalition is taking its recruitment efforts on the road,
crisscrossing America to fill the federal jobs. They staffed the Iowa
State Fair this month and signed up hundreds of people, and they’re
building out a database of potential employees, inviting them to be
trained in government operations.

“It’s counterintuitive,” Dans acknowledged — the idea of
joining government to shrink it — but he said that’s the lesson
learned from the Trump days about what’s needed to “regain
control.”

* Project 2025
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* Donald Trump
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* MAGA
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* GOP
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* Republican Party
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* 2024 Elections
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* Deep State
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* Fascism
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* federal workers
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* Heritage Foundation
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* democracy
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* Ron DeSantis
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* Vivek Ramaswamy
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