Educate yourself on Project 2025,
funded and promoted
by the "Heritage Foundation"
and make sure it fails.
"Project 2025 has a lot of different moving parts, which means that one way to begin understanding it is to scroll down through the table of contents and pick the chapter that interests you the most, starting there. There’s an entire chapter on plans for the Justice Department, a section on the military, and one, that has been discussed a lot, about the plan to cheapen the independence of federal civil servants. That move is more significant than you might think at first glance. Last November, I wrote about that plan:
“In October of 2020, before the last election, Trump was already taking steps in this direction. Trump signed an executive order making a change in civil service rules that made it possible to fire employees in policy positions ‘at will’—for no reason at all. Civil Service regulations are full of ‘schedules’ for different types of personnel and classifications like ‘exempted service’ that don’t mean much unless you’ve lived in the arcane world of federal employment. That made it difficult to understand what the executive order was about. More importantly, it was just too far in the weeds to resonate with folks at that time, when everyone was focused on more important matters like the upcoming election. But the order was characterized by people in the knows as a ‘stunning attempt to politicize the civil service and undermine more than a century of laws aimed at preventing corruption and cronyism in the federal government.’ It was the logical outcome of Trump’s obsession with a ‘deep state’ that he believed was out to get him.
The point of having a protected cadre of career civil service employees is to preserve expertise within government. But Trump’s executive order meant that any government employee involved in policymaking could be placed into a new Schedule F classification, a classification which left them vulnerable to evaluation based on their politics not their performance, and to dismissal for any reason. Not to put too fine of a point on it, but coming this late in the administration, the order could only be read as an effort to make sure Trump, in his next term (which thankfully didn’t materialize), could swiftly dispose of career employees he believed weren’t loyal to him. The order undid the pesky civil service protections that made it impossible to fire FBI agents who were investigating him or government lawyers who insisted he play by the rules. It was a harbinger of what Trump’s plans for 2025 would look like.
One of the first steps Joe Biden took after being sworn in was to rescind Trump’s executive order.”
This gives you a good sense of what Project 2025 is about. It doesn’t go off with a bang. It’s written in the banal language of federal agencies and the bureaucracy. You have to pay attention to understand it. It’s not a summer beach read, but this may be the most important book club selection you ever take up."
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