Project 2025 explained: Number 3
They replace career civil servants with the conservative army
This is the third post in a series in which I explore Project 2025, the conservative manifesto for how to transition to and run a conservative government. Conservatives hope to win the 2024 election, and they intend to be ready to restructure our government to accomplish their goals. Their plan is over 900 pages so I am never going to be able to discuss the whole thing with you, but my intention is to highlight some features of the plan that I think are important to democracy as we know it. You need to know about Project 2025 and, sadly, 76% of Americans know nothing about it. If you need to catch up, read my first post in the series here, and the second one here. As before, any quotes in my post come from the Project 2025 manual, so I will only cite this source.
As I have shown earlier, the Project 2025 “ . . . goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State." They are forming this army now - you can submit your resume through their web site. Now you may say that the government is already staffed, so where is this army going to go? Normally during a presidential transition a certain number of positions will be filled by political appointees and the conservative army would of course staff these positions. But Project 2025 goes much further and seeks to suspend normal civil service protections so that career civil servant positions (Senior Executive Service, or SES) can be filled by loyal members of the conservative army. Trump tried to do this.
The Trump Administration issued Executive Order 1395724 to make career professionals in positions that are not normally subject to change as a result of a presidential transition but who discharge significant duties and exercise significant discretion in formulating and implementing executive branch policy and programs an exception to the competitive hiring rules and examinations for career positions under a new Schedule F.
Civil service associations and unions objected, and Biden got rid of this executive order by Trump. Now, clearly, they want to bring back and implement Schedule F. This is a sore point with Project 2025 and they clearly want the president to have a sufficiently firm control over the employees of the executive branch that the conservative agenda will be diligently pursued by loyal members of the conservative army. Civil service regulations work against this objective, but Schedule F will fix that. Unions are another impediment to Project 2025 staffing plans, and there is a lot of whining in the plan about whether or not Unions are appropriate in the public sector. So, there is likely to be a strong push to get rid of unions as well.
Conservatives feel so strongly that the president needs to have direct control over personnel that they suggest including the Office of Personnel Management in Cabinet meetings.
If “personnel is policy” is to be our general guide, it would make sense to give the President direct supervision of the bureaucracy with the OPM Director available in his Cabinet.
Now I have a special treat for my subscribers just to do something a little different and lighten the mood since this is pretty heavy stuff and we have a weekend coming up. John Oliver recently did an episode on a potential Trump second term that includes the personnel aspects of Project 2025 that I have just discussed. So click on this and enjoy his take. It's about 30 minutes; the 2025 portion starts about 5 minutes in. I'll be back soon with another explanation of another aspect of Project 2025. Turn up the volume.