Project 2025

The authors of a would-be roadmap for a second Donald Trump administration, with their initiative known as “Project 2025, seek to return America “to its original moorings.” Yet they seem oblivious to the fact our nation’s founders were highly educated scions of the Enlightenment who viewed rationality and healthy debate as central to effective decision making.

Image: Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE)

By Craig Pedersen

There is a model of public governance policy facing America that is lurking in sheep’s clothing. Led by the Heritage Foundation, it is innocuously called Project 2025. It is, though, an extraordinarily radical effort to institutionalize a “Trump revolution” and an extreme version of “conservatism.” It is the voice of zealots – at least at the leadership level - who state that prior conservative efforts have not gone far enough.

It describes its policy alternatives in multiple sections. One broad element, as an example, is overturning the “administrative state.” Among other things, it envisions a war against the civil service. According to the Project 2025 director,

The axiom goes “personnel is policy,” and we need a new generation of Americans to answer the call and come to serve…Our 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.

In other words, recruit a cadre of very conservative and politically active individuals to staff the administrative state instead of existing individuals. This is one real radical Project 2025 agenda: replace your people with our people, despite never proving the assertion that your people are somehow malignant actors rather than a cross section of the American people who are just doing their jobs. The project is focused on driving existing civil service professionals out of the system and substituting ideological conservatives. One way of doing this is:

Political executives should take an active role in supervising performance appraisals of career staff…

It might sound innocuous to some, except that it is making explicit the political evaluation of non-political employees.

Another element of the approach is:

… the only real solution is for the national government to do less: to decentralize and privatize as much as possible and then ensure that the remaining bureaucracy is managed effectively along the lines of the enduring principles set out in detail here.

The recommendations of Project 2025 might, in some cases, reflect legitimate concerns or even reasonable sounding goals, but the recommendations cannot be read without the context of the political agenda that drives them. For example, in environmental policy:

To implement policies that are consistent with a conservative EPA, the agency will have to undergo a major reorganization.

In part, this rationale is directed at undercutting policy goals through personnel changes. It is clear to this reader, that they are setting the stage to undercut the civil service system without seeking legislative approval (another Supreme Court action?).

But this is only one element of a broad policy document that envisions other changes – not just to all areas of governance, but to the most personal of decisions.

The political leaders of Project 2025 give away their own biases with the over-the-top rhetoric they employ. They equate “progressive” policies with socialism, communism, and fascism (and without any sense of irony). In their eyes “transgenderism” is pornography and pornography fills libraries whose keepers must be treated as evil. (That’s right: in their eyes your local librarian is procuring smut for your children.)  They support the passionate beliefs of parents as an alternative to the trained education of practitioners (apparently so that non-existent curricula can be demagogued by misinformed parents at school board meetings). They rail against ineffective congressional leadership which they themselves have fostered. This is but a few examples of the shortcomings of this project and its underlying ideology.

Project 2025 is ultimately a political leadership document with a very specific and very extreme form of politics envisioned. Its leaders seek to return America “to its original moorings.” Yet they seem oblivious to the irony they express. The founders were highly educated scions of the Enlightenment who viewed rationality and healthy debate as central to effective decision making. They sought to avoid extremes of viewpoints and to tamp down passions, especially those not based on rationality.

Project 2025 attempts to institutionalize the opposite. It employs fear and harsh rhetoric to drive anger and extreme action. It elevates passion over analysis. Further, and more damning, it seeks to conceal its true agenda in misleading statements and characterizations. It is certainly true that there are issues needing addressing. But starting with such an extreme articulation of both goal and process cannot lead to a legitimate outcome.

America deserves better than this. Those of us who truly care about this country and its founding philosophy now have another reason to reject radical Republicanism and the forces supporting Trump.

We are known by the company we keep. The close ties between the leadership of Project 2025 and Donald Trump are noteworthy. Key leaders worked for Trump previously in important positions. Project 2025 reflects a dangerous and fundamentally anti-American assault on the heritage of our nation. It should be resoundingly rejected. The Dodd Decision on abortion has already demonstrated the consequences of passivity. We are forewarned and must aggressively meet this new challenge. Rejecting Project 2025 requires informing oneself, calling out its radical ideas, and making those ideas an issue against a possible second Trump presidency.

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Craig Pedersen has over 40 years of professional experience in organizational leadership and policy positions. He has served on the staffs of some of the most influential leaders in Texas state history, including William P. Hobby and Bob Bullock. Mr. Pedersen has also successfully led complex organizations in both the public and private sectors. He has also completed a manuscript developed from his recent research tentatively titled Doing Good Well: Public and Nonprofit Leadership Essentials.