Politics

A network of conservative groups is gearing up for the potential reelection of Donald Trump, actively enlisting an "army" of Americans to come to Washington with a mission to disassemble the federal government and substitute it with a vision that aligns more closely with their own beliefs and ideas, according to The Associated Press.

Organized by the Heritage Foundation, the sweeping new initiative called Project 2025, offers a policy agenda, transition plan, a playbook for the first 180 days and a personnel database for the next GOP president to access from the very beginning to take control, reform, and eliminate what Republicans criticize as the "deep state" bureaucracy. Their plan includes the possibility of firing as many as 50,000 federal employees.

Democracy experts view Project 2025 as an authoritarian attempt to seize power by filling the federal government, including the Department of Justice and the FBI, with unwavering Trump supporters, which could potentially erode the country's system of checks and balances.

"The irony of course is that in the name of 'draining the swamp', it creates opportunities to make the federal government actually quite corrupt and turn the country into a more authoritarian kind of government," Matt Dallek, a professor at George Washington's Graduate School of Political Management, who studies the American right, told Salon.

One of the most important bulwarks of democracy is the career of federal civil service, he added. Civil servants often have decades of experience inside their agencies and provide knowledge of policy and law in the federal government that enables them to serve the public.

"The country relies on these people to not only enact administration or presidential priorities, but also to enact the laws and fulfill their oath of office," Dallek said.

He pointed to one of the dangers of this project, which includes "the purging of federal employees," as he described it, or the project's plans to fire and replace federal workers en masse in an effort to dismantle the "deep state."

"In basically one fell swoop – if this plan were to be implemented – we would, as a society, lose many of the people who help [the federal government] function and also the people who are not subjected to the whims of the president," Dallek said.

This would make it difficult for agencies like the FBI, the DOJ or the CIA to carry out their nonpartisan missions and to fulfill their oath of office and oath to the Constitution, Dallek explained.

By replacing federal employees with like-minded officials, Trump-era conservatives are planning to remove federal employees whom they perceive as obstacles to the president's agenda early on. This would avoid "the pitfalls of Trump's first years in office," and eliminate the possibility of any resistance a Republican president would encounter, the AP reported.

"Project 2025 is extremists' newest plan to set fire to our democracy," Kyle Herrig, a senior adviser at the left-leaning government watchdog group Accountable.US, told Salon. "It would allow far-right groups like Heritage and the Conservative Partnership Institute to implement their dangerous wish lists with no regard for everyday Americans."

If Project 2025 is implemented, it would reinstate Schedule F — an executive order from the Trump era aimed at redefining the employment status of tens of thousands of federal employees, effectively making them at-will workers and removing protections for anyone in decision-making positions.

Upon taking office in 2021, Biden revoked the executive order. However, Trump, along with other potential presidential candidates, is pledging to reinstate it.

Anywhere from 50,000 to hundreds of thousands of federal employees can be impacted by it since Schedule F is "ambiguously written," allowing political appointees to extend its application from top civil servants to those in lower ranks, Mary Guy, a professor of public administration at the University of Colorado Denver, told Salon.

"The problem with removing job protections from civil servants is that experienced executives are no longer protected should they need to speak truth to power and explain the downsides to what otherwise seems like a 'good' idea," Guy said. "They are at risk of being fired for offering alternative points of view or insisting that laws, such as the Administrative Procedures Act, be followed."

Project 2025's nearly 1,000-page policy blueprint, called "Mandate for Leadership," serves as a step-by-step guide for the incoming president, from proposing a comprehensive transformation of the Department of Justice to ending the FBI's efforts to combat the dissemination of misinformation. It even includes plans to intensify the prosecution of individuals involved in providing or distributing abortion pills by mail.

"The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors," the document says. "This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity ('SOGI'), diversity, equity, and inclusion Project ('DEI'), gender, gender equality, gender equity … and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists."

There are suggestions to reverse the Biden Administration's use of the federal government's resources to "further the woke agenda" and erase them from all policy manuals, guidance documents and agendas.

"From gutting critical climate protections to dismantling checks and balances to put maximum power in the hands of the president, Project 2025 takes extremism to a whole new level," Herrig said. "The project — and the dark network propping it up — must be held accountable for their efforts to undermine our democracy."

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Although presidents usually depend on Congress to implement policies, the Heritage Project embraces a perspective known to legal scholars as a unitary view of executive power. This perspective asserts that the president possesses extensive authority to act alone, as the AP report highlights.

The dangers of subordinating the entire federal government to the "whims of one person," is like pointing "a dagger at the heart of democracy," Dallek said.

"It's a central threat to democracy because what we would lose is some of the important checks and balances that are within the executive branch, and that frankly, we saw playing out in the run-up to January 6," he added.

While these checks and balances were not perfect, he pointed out, senior officials in the federal government were able to push back on the Big Lie and the delaying of the certification of the election.

"It showed that even at the end of Trump's first term, there were some mechanisms in place to defeat Trump's efforts basically to steal the election," Dallek said. "The danger of this project is that it would weaken these already atrophied mechanisms."

In addition to this, the project would also "demonize" civil servants, who do the type of work that keeps democracy functioning, he added.

"So an attack on them is also an attack on democracy, and that's why I think it has advocates of democracy so concerned about the future of the country," Dallek said.