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Radical Overhaul: Project 2025's Sweeping Plan to Transform Federal Government Under GOP
On a quiet April morning in 2023, the Heritage Foundation released a staggering 900-page document titled Project 2025, a blueprint that would soon pulse through think tanks and campaign war rooms. Billed as a “Mandate for Leadership,” Project 2025 lays out an unprecedented roadmap for transforming the federal government in the event of a Republican administration, leaving no department untouched and no norm unquestioned.
At its center is a bold vision: bring the entire executive branch under direct presidential command. Quoting the Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts, “all federal employees should answer to the president.” To achieve this, Project 2025 proposes to overhaul the doctrine of separation between agencies like the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Federal Communications Commission. Kiron Skinner, who co-authored parts of the plan, argues that leadership at the State Department should be swept clean and restaffed with more loyal, ideologically vetted officials, sidestepping Senate confirmation when possible. She told CNN last June that seasoned diplomats were simply “too left-wing” to implement conservative policy, though she struggled to name examples of open resistance.
One of Project 2025’s most controversial elements is Schedule F, a personnel mechanism designed to undo decades-old civil service protections. The idea is simple and dramatic: reclassify key federal positions to allow political firing and hiring at will. Without these protections, career staff could be ousted en masse and replaced by partisan loyalists. According to a recent Office of Personnel Management memo, every agency has been instructed to draft plans for a “significant reduction in the number of full-time positions” and to “consolidate management layers where unnecessary layers exist.” The Department of Government Efficiency—led by Elon Musk in collaboration with President Trump—has already executed some of these plans in chaotic fashion, abolishing entire agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Board and Voice of America before court rulings temporarily reinstated their staff.
The impact stretches far beyond personnel charts. Project 2025 recommends dissolving the federal Education Department, closing or consolidating Agriculture field offices, and stripping the IRS’s Office of Civil Rights and Compliance to a skeletal staff. These moves are justified, according to the project’s authors, by the goal of eliminating inefficiency and rooting out what they see as a pervasive liberal bias. Former Trump Justice Department official Gene Hamilton, who helped pen Project 2025’s justice chapter, contends that the DOJ has “forfeited the trust” of the American people, pledging to prosecute any state or private employer with “DEI or affirmative action programs.” He calls it a fight against “anti-white racism,” intentionally invoking the language of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
There has been vocal opposition. The American Federation of Government Employees warns the plan could terminate up to one million federal jobs, with ripple effects on community services nationwide. The ACLU and other civil rights groups have sounded alarms, describing the project as a threat to democratic norms and checks on executive power. Nonetheless, Project 2025’s architects remain steadfast. In a statement to Politico, a Heritage Foundation spokesperson declared, “Simply put: we are seeking to mainstream the most transformational conservative policies in half a century.”
Central to the project is a “Day One playbook,” a stack of ready-to-sign executive orders meant to kickstart reforms within hours of a new administration. Experts tracking these developments for the Center for Progressive Reform note that this approach risks not just instability but also legal battles, as rapid agency closures have already prompted emergency court injunctions and union pushback.
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