Project 2025: A Conservative Hostile Takeover
As the 2024 presidential election nears, conservatives led by The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint reports preparing for a significant shift in governance. Should Donald Trump win the presidency, the project would initiate an extensive overhaul, replacing key government employees identified with ‘woke’ ideologies and policies in exchange for vetted loyalists.
In the White House, the plan aims to institute an executive order known as Schedule F. The order would change the status of tens of thousands of federal employees to at-will. This change would enable Trump to fire without cause any federal employee within his administration who halts, disagrees, or poses a barrier to his agenda.
“We have a democracy that is at risk of suicide. Schedule F is just one more bullet in the gun,” said Mary Guy, a professor of public administration at the University of Colorado, Denver.
The forward from the 920-page Project 2025 document states, “[t]he next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensi-tive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, 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.”
Beyond the immediate targeting of federal employees, the plan includes ambitious proposals such as reforming or dissolving agencies like the Department of Education and the Department of Homeland Security and reallocating resources from the FBI’s misinformation countermeasures.
The next Trump administration would also end the Environmental Protection Agency’s programs to combat climate change. The Project 2025 report calls efforts to replace fossil fuels “environmental extremism.”
According to Andrew Rosenberg, a former senior official at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “… [Project 2025] undermines not only society but the economic capacity of the country [and is] doing gross violence to the environment.”
While a new Trump administration may not adopt all the Project 2025 initiatives, in Trump’s first term as president, the Heritage Foundation found that 64 percent of their policy recommendations were “included in Trump’s budget, implemented through regulatory guidance, or under consideration for action…”
According to the Project 2025 plan, these steps are essential for realigning federal agencies with their vision of governance. The project has already started the process of training and selecting candidates for crucial positions within the potential new administration and across the federal government.
