Project 2025: Better Policymaking Through Conspiracy Theories
If the words “Project 2025” don’t send a chill down your spine yet, they should. A Heritage-Foundation-led attack plan for a second Trump presidential term, it aspires to nothing short of a complete transformation of the federal governing apparatus as we know it. In contrast to previous conservative attacks on the administrative state – which sought a “deconstruction” as former Trump advisor Steve Bannon put it – the general goal of Project 2025 is much different, and arguably more sinister. That’s because it lays out a comprehensive strategy for hacking and reprograming the administrative state into a powerful tool to support an autocratic presidential administration.
Project 2025 comprises four pillars. Two are focused on recruiting and training “loyal” conservatives committed to the conservative cause to serve in leadership positions throughout a second Trump administration. A third, which has yet to be released, is aimed at scoring major victories during the first 6 months after inauguration. The final pillar, which is really the centerpiece of Project 2025, is a 900-page-plus policy blueprint called Mandate for Leadership. The product of nearly 100 ultra-rightwing think tanks and advocacy organizations, this document covers virtually any policy issue you can think of.
Over the course of many decades, the modern administrative state has developed and refined a series of institutional features that make it a powerful bulwark against corruption and other forms of abuse of power by presidents and their political appointees. One of these is expertise, and the role it plays in carrying out the instructions that congress lays out for agencies in law.
Expertise plays a key legitimizing function for the administrative state. Congress recognized the need for the application of professionalized expertise to transform its laws into concrete, enforceable policies, and that is precisely why it authorized the creation of agencies and annually funds their staff to perform this task. (Conversely, it would be the failure of agencies to exercise expertise in carrying out their work that would be illegitimate.) And, even if members of the public may not necessarily agree with a particular decision, the fact that is the product of legally relevant expertise helps to make that decision somewhat acceptable to them.
Relatedly, the reasoned-based decision-making that derives from agency expertise also serves as an important accountability tool. Agency decisions and actions are generally eligible for legal challenge in the courts. One of the ways to prevail in those challenges is to show that agency experts did not consider relevant evidence or that the decision or action was in some way unsupported by the evidence that they did consider. In other words, one can show that agency expertise was lacking in some important way.
Project 2025 disregards all of this, of course. Instead, it would sweep away the rich tradition of expertise in the administrative state. In its place, outlier and extremist views would be elevated and conspiracy theories would become policy-determinative “evidence.”
Project 2025 delineates two distinct but complementary tracks for achieving this new vision. The first of these embraces various strategies that would have the intent and effect of sidelining or even purging the ranks of the administrative state of neutral experts. By now, the most infamous of these gambits is Schedule F. Pioneered during the first Trump administration, this proposal would reclassify the thousands of career government employees who play some role in policy formation outside of the competitive service. By stripping public servants of basic employment protections that have been in place for over 140 years, this policy would effectively transform large swaths of the civil service into “at will” employees who could be fired for any reason or no reason at all.
Defenders of Schedule F claim that this reform is essential for ensuring better accountability over the administrative state. In reality, it is meant to make it easier to remove public servants who would put their duty to the law and their professional expertise ahead of loyalty to the president – and to discourage others who might consider doing the same.
Another strategy targets the Senior Executive Service (SES), a special band within the civil service that serves as a crucial bridge between political appointees and lower line career staff by providing management support as well as specialized expertise. Several chapters throughout Mandate for Leadership include recommendations for creating a hostile workplace for members of the SES with the goal of forcing them to resign on their own. These recommendations include relocating members of the SES to different geographic areas around the United States and reassigning them to positions unrelated to their expertise. During the first Trump term, Joel Clement, a climate scientist and former member of the SES at the Department of Interior, became perhaps the best-known victim of this strategy when he suffered retaliation for disclosing government research demonstrating the harms of climate change to Indigenous American populations.
Still another strategy promoted in Mandate for Leadership is removing security clearances from public servants employed at national security-related agencies. Without such clearances, these individuals cannot perform their jobs. Much as with the SES, this hostile treatment is intended to force these individuals to resign their position.
Sweeping out and silencing the existing agency experts then makes room for the second track in Project 2025’s broader campaign to reprogram the administrative state so that it becomes enshrouded in a fog of misleading doubts, disinformation, and myths: Actively promoting fringe views. Mandate for Leadership takes advantage of the fact that the doors of Schedule F and security clearance abuses swing both ways to accomplish this objective. The lack of employee protections means that agencies can also hire whomever they want without resorting to the competitive hiring process, and Project 2025 makes clear that unquestioned loyalty to the president, as opposed to professionalism and expertise, is the only real qualification that matters. Similarly, great political control over the assignment of security clearances can ensure that loyal voices are heard loud and clear when it comes to making decisions on national security policy.
Another strategy the Mandate for Leadership recommends is further outsourcing key government functions to the private (for profit) sector and favoring conservative-minded contractors. For example, in the chapter on the intelligence community, the policy blueprint recommends turning over more intelligence gathering activities to the private sector. And, in the chapter on international aid, it recommends relying more heavily on “faith-based organizations” to dispense aid instead of more established non-profits and contractors that have done this work for decades.
Finally, the policy agenda calls for various forms of “affirmative action” that would ensure that conspiracy theories and other outlier views are reserved a spot in important policy discussions. For instance, in discussing reforms to “improve” the preparation of the President’s Daily Briefing on national security issues, Mandate for Leadership calls for the inclusion of “properly channeled dissent.” This recommendation is particularly worrying because elsewhere the report urges reform of how intelligence analysis is conducted to prevent “political views” from being used to “squash dissent.”
This second track of reforms to kneecap agency expertise is especially pernicious because, at first blush, it appears to embrace valid principles of sound science, and particularly the need for ensuring proper consideration of novel views to prevent siloed thinking that can otherwise stifle scientific progress. As we have seen in recent years, though, regulated industry and its conservative allies in government have become particularly adept at this tactic of improperly weaponizing otherwise sound tenets of scientific integrity. For instance, this tactic was at the heart of the Trump administration’s efforts to promote “scientific transparency” by barring research for which underlying data could not justifiably be disclosed.
More recently, various industry groups riffed on the idea of dissenting views in their comments on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) proposed update to its scientific integrity policy. Specifically, they called on the agency to revise this policy to allow outside groups like theirs to provide “dissenting” views on what the relevant scientific literature says about a particular question.
To be sure, considering such differing views is an important tool for ensuring the robustness of scientific conclusions, which will always be subject to some degree of uncertainty. But this tool only works when these views are prepared and offered in good faith. In contrast, Project 2025 is concerned with short-circuiting strong consensus views on a wide range of issues inconvenient to its preferred policy agenda in order to create crippling doubt or elevate their fringe viewpoints – much as climate deniers succeeded in doing for decades.
The looming threat that Project 2025 poses has helped to clarify the essential role that our administrative state plays as a bulwark against political corruption and illiberal backsliding. Importantly, one way that advocates can help resist this threat is by strengthening safeguards for agency expertise. In doing so, a lot more than just the effective functioning of the administrative state is at stake. It could also determine the future trajectory of our democracy for decades to come.
About the author
James Goodwin is a senior policy analyst at the Center for Progressive Reform where he directs the Responsive Government Program. He has studied and written on progressive regulatory reform for 16 years.
The opinions expressed in the posts on SciLight are those of the individual authors.
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