Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s roadmap for a second Trump administration, written mostly by high-ranking members of his first administration, and spanning 922 pages, is basically a collection of policy transition proposals from 54 conservative organizations that outline how, should Trump win the November election, he can vastly remake the federal government to most effectively carry out a highly conservative, even extremist, agenda.
“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections,” the project’s website states. “If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration. This is the goal of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project.”
Section 3, Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy, is all about having “the right people in place.” It devotes nearly all of its 17 pages to denigrating federal employees, maintaining they have better pay and benefits than private sector workers, are nearly always highly rated in performance appraisals, are difficult or even impossible to terminate for poor performance, and have undue union protection. Authors Donald Devine, Dennis Dean Kirk, and Paul Dans point to President Trump’s attempts to rein in this abuse by issuing three executive orders near the end of his administration, which President Biden upon taking office promptly countermanded.
Here’s what Project 2025 says about that “undue union protection:”
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.
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.
Like a bright red rope in the snow, a careful reading of Section 3 leads one to conclude that Project 2025’s priority regarding the federal workforce is “getting the right people in place” without civil service or union protection. In short, the authors are looking for loyalists.
How would Project 2025 get “the right people in place?”
There are three tiers of workers in the federal civilian workforce:
- The first consists of the rank and file workers, and there are 2.87 million of them. Sixty-percent of these employees work for the Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security. There are 15 pay grade levels for these workers, beginning with GS-1 (starting pay – $27,822) and continuing through GS-15 (pay ranges from $155,700 to $183,500).
- The second tier encompasses the nearly 9,000 Senior Executive Service (SES) positions. SES employees are leaders who work in key positions just below presidential appointees in about 75 federal agencies. They act as a bridge between career employees and political appointees and oversee nearly every governmental activity. Their compensation ranges from $135,468 to $203,700. Project 2025 alleges this is the group that stymied President Trump’s policy aims.
- The third tier consists of the slightly more than 1,100 political appointees (minimum base pay is 120% of the beginning rate for a GS-15 worker). All of these require Senate confirmation. These appointees are the spoils of presidential victory, and their mission is to carry out the mandates of the President.
In the last month of his first term, frustrated by what he perceived as SES obstructionism to his desires and claiming that certain statutory language exempted SES positions from any civil service employment protections then in force, Donald Trump issued an executive order that would have stripped civil service employment protections from Senior Executive Service employees perceived as disloyal and would have required expressions of allegiance to the president upon hiring. Schedule F was the name of the new employment category the executive order created.
The Biden Administration rescinded Trump’s executive order before it could go into effect and took steps to clarify and strengthen existing protections for civil servants.
Project 2025’s page 80 focuses in on the Senior Executive Service as not “respecting” the “political rights” of Administration leadership. Therefore, it justifies the creation of Schedule F thusly:
Frustrated with the 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.
Project 2025 then says President Trump’s Schedule F “should be reinstated.”
If it were, what would be the consequences?
In the first place, presidential loyalty would be the prime hiring requirement not only for the eleven-hundred highest ranking people in government, but also for all 9,000 second tier SES governmental managers. Second, SES Schedule F employees, who oversee the nearly three million rank and file federal workers, would be ideally positioned to drive a president’s agenda, regardless of its merit or legality. Third, Schedule F would also allow loyalty requirements for higher ranking, 1st tier, rank and file federal employees. There is nothing in the Schedule F executive order that would prevent this, although Project 2025 says, “SES responsibility should come first.”
Historical context
With the death of German President Paul von Hindenburg on August 2, 1934. Adolf Hitler began to solidify his control over Germany. That same day, all military personnel in Germany swore a new oath of allegiance. The oath was no longer one of allegiance to the Weimar Republic’s Constitution or its institutions, but one of binding loyalty to Hitler himself:
“I swear by God this holy oath, that I will render to Adolf Hitler, Führer of the German Reich and People, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, unconditional obedience, and that I am ready, as a brave soldier, to risk my life at any time for this oath.”
From this point forward, all existing units and all new military recruits would swear the so-called “Führer Oath.” The oath became law in July 1935. The Nazis required civilian officials to swear a similar oath.
The Führer Oath did not happen overnight. Hitler and his henchmen had been planning it for years. Before taking the oath, military leaders had to be softened up, rather like the frog in the increasingly heated water. Some, perhaps most, Americans sincerely believe this could never happen in the greatest democracy the world has ever known.
In 1933, most Germans believed something like that, too.
