Going Deep into Project 2025 - Partisan Priorities for Civil Servants

Part two: Building a Bureaucracy By Tearing It Down

I’m happy to say Project 2025 is starting to get the scrutiny it deserves. 

Part one in this series saw increased traffic on this site, and there were social media posts recommending my deeper dive into the plan for Donald J Trump’s ascension into the White House. (Thank you)

Some in the mainstream media have begun reporting on Project 2025 proposals, even as the Republican presumed nominee continues to brush off reports of his campaign’s connections.

CNN sorted through the resumes of persons publicly linked to Project 2025 and came up with hundreds of contributors who have worked for Trump,

• Overall, CNN found nearly 240 people with ties to both Project 2025 and to Trump, covering nearly every aspect of his time in politics and the White House – from day-to-day foot soldiers in Washington to the highest levels of his government. The number is likely higher because many individuals’ online résumés were not available.

• In addition to people who worked directly for Trump, others who participated in Project 2025 were appointed by the former president to independent positions. For instance, Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr authored an entire chapter of proposed changes to his agency, and Lisa Correnti, an anti-abortion advocate Trump appointed as a delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, is among the contributors.

CBS looked at the tax proposals in Project 2025. I certainly wasn’t surprised to learn that the two-tier flat tax envisioned favors the wealthy.

• Millions of low- and middle-class households would likely face significantly higher taxes under the Project 2025's proposals. 

• He estimated that a middle-class family with two children and an annual income of $100,000 would pay $2,600 in additional federal income tax if they faced a 15% flat tax on their income due to the loss of the 10% and 12% tax brackets. If the Child Tax Credit were also eliminated, they would pay an additional $6,600 compared with today's tax system, Duke said. 

• By comparison, a married couple with two children and earnings of $5 million a year would enjoy a $325,000 tax cut, he estimated. 

Unfortunately, too many news organizations have published (or used inaccurate headlines) claiming the GOP platform somehow represents a more moderate view on abortion. Using the 14th Amendment as a foundation for their “ right to life” position mandates a national abortion ban to be created through judicial decisions.

The public was presented with shallow stories missing the rhetorical sleight of hand, as documented at Popular Information:. 

• The New York Times: "Following Trump’s Lead, Republicans Adopt Platform That Softens Stance on Abortion"

• NBC: "Trump pushes new GOP platform softening party’s positions on abortion and same-sex marriage"

• Roll Call: "RNC softens platform stance on abortion"

• HuffPost: "New GOP Platform Strikes National Abortion Ban"

• AP: "Republicans move at Trump’s behest to change how they will oppose abortion"

ALSO: Former President Donald Trump has been caught on video praising a think tank whose plans he now says he didn't know existed.

• “This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do, and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America," Trump told the crowd about the Heritage Foundation.

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What I have promised readers with this series on Project 2025 is a more extensive analysis going beyond the bullet lists and memes in circulation. Yesterday’s column covered the introductory chapters and two sections from the chapter Taking the Reins of Government..

Today, I’ll dive into Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy by Donald Devine,* Dennis Dean Kirk* & Paul Dans*

Three main points:

Change criteria for hiring through discriminatory or ideological-based examinations. The private database being used to build a right wing job bank for future administration hires includes testing with ideological questions. And IQ type tests would be reinstated through legislative or regulatory processes.

Replace non-partisan federal employees with partisan loyalists. Reclassifying civil servants to fire at-will positions, and a privately run screening service seeking to identify potentially “disloyal” employees.

“Reform” federal employee rights and benefits. Unions are not compatible with government employment in their view and they will seek judicial and legislative remedies. Benefits need to be downsized.

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You have to wade through pages and pages of complaints about government employees before you realize what this section is all about is Making America Great Again by reverting to the days where people lined up at the White House looking for jobs when administrations changed.

Cynically speaking, we got some quality hires back in the day; a precinct captain’s third cousin twice removed could certainly do a better job than the wretched class of today’s federal employees. The advantages of having ‘my way or the highway’ as a performance review protocol sounds really attractive when the employment metric is all about serving the Dear Leader. I do seem to remember something about a disappointed office seeker taking a pot shot at the President, but that was then and this is now. 

Going beyond critiques of current and past systems of hiring and evaluating government employees, the authors blame deficiencies in the federal bureaucracy on the “progressive” ideology that values the expertise of professionals in promoting the general welfare, like that Dr. Fauci guy.

Apparently the only expertise that matters belongs to those who are elected to office as the word “experts” is nearly always preceded by “unelected.”

By the end of this section you should realize the end goals of Project 2025’s stance on the federal bureaucracy are eliminating public sector unions and challenging the constitutionality of the civil service system.

The reasoning here is unions and civil service protocols have created unconstitutional barriers to the president’s responsibility, in Article II of the Constitution, to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” 

From Page 82:

• Congress should also consider whether public-sector unions are appropriate in the first place. The bipartisan consensus up until the middle of the 20th century held that these unions were not compatible with constitutional government.30 After more than half a century of experience with public-sector union frustrations of good government management, it is hard to avoid reaching the same conclusion.

I’m sure the Supreme Court will be glad to assist in making the bureaucracy wither away.

In the meantime, the incoming administration will need to flood government offices with the thousands of volunteers that they are already screening. New hires will be tested with materials not infected with “woke” ideology,

One organization advising Project 2025, American Accountability Foundation, is putting together a roster of current federal workers it suspects could impede Trump’s plans for a second term. The Heritage Foundation is paying the group $100,000 for its work.

And things will get easier once the Schedule F plan is implemented, making far more federal employees—in at least the tens of thousands—at-will workers who could be easily dismissed.

From page 80:

• Frustrated with these activities by top career executives, the Trump Administration issued Executive Order 1395724 to make career professionals in positions that are not normally subject to change as a result of a presidential transition but who discharge significant duties and exercise significant discretion in formulating and implementing executive branch policy and programs an exception to the competitive hiring rules and examinations for career positions under a new Schedule F. 

• It ordered the Director of OPM and agency heads to set procedures to prepare lists of such confidential, policy-determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating positions and prepare procedures to create exceptions from civil service rules when careerists hold such positions, from which they can relocate back to the regular civil service after such service. 

• The order was subsequently reversed by President — 81 — 2025 Presidential Transition Project Biden25 at the demand of the civil service associations and unions. It should be reinstated, but SES responsibility should come first

The authors advocate for reforming federal retirement benefits. They start by decrying the fact that federal employees have benefits that are actually sufficient to meet their needs.

Of course, “reform” in right wing parlance means forcing people to settle for less. Private sector benefits are held up as the standard for the future, even though companies acquired by merger and private equity groups are dumping employee benefits as fast as they can.

The days of defined pension plans in private enterprise are mostly over, replaced by contributed pension funds. What this means in practical terms is that the burden of paying the costs of post-retirement income has switched from employer (who may or may not contribute) to employee (401 plans and their ilk.)

Only about a third of small business employees (46.4% of the workforce) have any sort of pension plan. The federal government under the Biden administration has been actively promoting small business plans, an activity that will either be curtailed or auctioned off.

Using private industry as a standard by which to judge government operations and performance is a holdover from the Reagan era, where scammy consultants (Carl DeMaio comes to mind) peddled privatization as a cure for just about everything. This movement toward outside contractors has effectively reduced oversight and led to a revolving door system, particularly in the area of National Security.

Here are the final few sentences from the section on managing the bureaucracy.

• Modern progressive politics has simply given the national government more to do than the complex separation-of-powers Constitution allows. That progressive system has broken down in our time, and 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.

Author bios:

*Donald Devine was Director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management during Ronald Reagan’s first term. He withdrew his name from consideration for a second term at the position after it was revealed that he’d ordered an assistant to lie during testimony before congress. His tenure at OPM was marked by bitter conflict with federal sector unions and executive associations.

*Dennis Dean Kirk is Associate Director of personnel policy for the 2025 Presidential Transition Project at The Heritage Foundation. He was Trump’s Senior Advisor at the Office of Personnel Management.

*Paul Dans was Chief of Staff at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, served as OPM's White House liaison, and was a senior advisor with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. He is currently Director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project at The Heritage Foundation. 

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Next up in this series (Monday) I’ll dive into Section Two, The Common Defense. Project 2025 has an especially big word salad (more than 120 pages) on the Department of Defense mainly involving tailoring the armed forces to be less sissified and more willing to kill.

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Thursday’s Noteworthy News Links

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The Body Camera - The Language of Our Dreams (Excerpted from a larger study published in the Yale Journal of Law and Liberation) via Alec Karakatsanis

• And yet, body cameras have not prevented police killings: In each year after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, U.S. police have killed more people than they had the previous year^[9] despite deploying hundreds of thousands more body cameras.

• After a decade-long public relations campaign, police obtained more cameras than they ever dreamed, investors in multi-billion-dollar companies got a lot richer, and body cameras are routinely used to gather evidence to convict poor Black people. Perhaps most significantly, I show below how the public discourse about government violence has been distorted away from discussion of material changes that could actually reduce all forms of violence.

• The story of the body camera is more important than one technological boondoggle. The body camera is part of a larger dynamic in powerful institutions are able to preserve the worst parts of our society, including not only unjustifiable (and unpopular) inequalities, but also the promise that they are always working hard to address them.

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I.R.S. Crackdown on Delinquent Millionaires Yields $1 Billion via The New York Times

• The tax agency has been undergoing a $60 billion modernization initiative aimed at improving its customer service and catching wealthy tax evaders. The Biden administration, which initially signed a law giving $80 billion to the agency, continues to contend with attempts by Republicans in Congress to claw back more of the money. As a result, the administration has been trying to demonstrate that the funds are being put to good use by bringing in additional tax revenue that has been going uncollected.

• “Efforts to increase tax fairness and bring in revenue from high-end taxpayers who have not paid what they owe are already paying off to the American people,” Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said during a briefing with reporters.

• The I.R.S. targeted 1,600 taxpayers with more than $1 million of income who owed more than $250,000 in tax debt.

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Investigation found that Clarence Thomas took free yacht, helicopter trips in Russia: Democrats Via Salon

• A Senate Judiciary Committee investigation found that conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas failed to disclose at least 35 luxury gifts, including a free yacht trip to Russia and a private helicopter to a palace in St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin's hometown, Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., and Ron Wyden, D-Or., said in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland.

• The letter raised the "serious possibility of tax fraud" and accused Thomas of having "secretly accepted gifts and income potentially worth millions of dollars," mostly from billionaire real estate developer Harlan Crow, who Thomas once described as being among his "dearest friends." Buried in appendix list on page 14 are the references to the Russia trips, which took place in 2003. Other gifts from Crow include "multiple instances of free private jet travel, yacht travel, and lodging," "gifts of tuition for Justice Thomas's grandnephew," "real estate transactions," "home renovations," and "free rent for Justice Thomas's mother."