By David Pepper
Project 2025: The Actual Plan
Trump, Vance and Project 2025 are crystal clear that the first move of their right-wing takeover of American government would be the displacement of tens of thousands of non-partisan civil servants with political and personal loyalists. And they’re equally clear that displacing science and scientists is a central theme of that agenda.
Recruiting and Training Partisan Activists
Project 2025’s opening pages explain that its overall success requires a “trained and committed cadre of personnel to implement” the overall plan. (Page xiii) “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.” (Page xiv)
And the first Chapter of Project 2025 — “Taking the Reins of Government” — focuses on how “the new Administration must fill its ranks with political appointees…. Empowering political appointees across the Administration is crucial to a President’s success.” (Page 20).
“Political appointees who are answerable to the President and have decision-making authority in the executive branch are key to this essential task. The next Administration must not cede such authority to non-partisan “experts,” who pursue their own ends while engaging in groupthink, insulated from American voters.”
The plan continues: “Any new Administration would be wise to learn that it will need a full cadre of sound political appointees from the beginning if it expects to direct this enormous federal bureaucracy.” (Page 82)
But the plan’s authors don’t just propose all this. They’re already working on it.
A big part of Project 2025 is its ongoing effort to recruit and train political loyalists to enter the new government through the “Presidential Administration Academy," an online educational system taught by experts from our coalition. For the newcomer, this will explain how the government functions and how to function in government.”
The goal is to recruit at least “20,000 new foot soldiers.”
They’re already airing a recruiting video, instructing their recruits: “It’s your job to ensure that that power is executed…in line with the President’s will.” Here it is (already viewed 17,000 times):
Replacing Civil Servants and Experts with Loyalists
With this new army of political foot solders in place, Project 2025 and its backers don’t mince words about their goal: “Bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”
How? As JD Vance says— “fire ‘every civil servant in the administrative state.’”
In everyday speak, that means get rid of experts and scientists who are in the government because of their expertise—and not politics or loyalty. Trust in these employees is the problem, according to Project 2025—“the progressive ideology that unelected experts can and should be trusted to promote the general welfare in just about every area of social life.” (Page 83).
So Project 2025 aims to end this approach: “A conservative President must move swiftly to do away with these vast abuses of presidential power and remove the career and political bureaucrats who fuel it.” (Page 8) He must “bring the Administrative State to heel, and in the process defang and defund the woke culture warriors who have infiltrated every last institution in America.” (Page 9). Project 2025 “…lays out how to use many of these tools including: how to fire supposedly “un-fireable” federal bureaucrats.” (Page 9)
How? It’s Called Schedule F
The vehicle to get this done is called Schedule F — where the administration is “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.” (Page 80)
Trump tried this toward the end of his presidency, but Biden rescinded the order before it took effect.
Currently, there are around 4,000 political appointees in the federal government. Project 2025 aims to bring that number to at least 50,000—but this “is probably a floor rather than a ceiling, which will ultimately be determined by a highly politicized leadership that might want to clean house.”
“They are stating unequivocally that federal employees must give their loyalty to the president, and that he or she should be able to remove anyone insufficiently devoted to the cause.”
For a broader primer on Schedule F, go HERE.
A Top Target: Scientists, CDC, Pandemic Prevention
Amid this overall politicization of the federal workforce, both Project 2025 and Trump himself have made clear that they are targeting scientists, health experts and, yes, pandemic prevention.
The CDC, Project 2025 explains, is “perhaps the most incompetent and arrogant agency in the federal government,” and “should be split into two separate entities.” (Page 452).
The plan mandates that the CDC should go beyond health risk assessments in its recommendations, into some type of quasi-religious balancing: “For example, how much risk mitigation is worth the price of shutting down churches on the holiest day of the Christian calendar and far beyond as happened in 2020? What is the proper balance of lives saved versus souls saved?” (Page 453)
And the CDC should not make recommendations on how Americans can keep themselves health and safe. “By statute or regulation, CDC guidance must be prohibited from taking on a prescriptive character. For example, never again should CDC officials be allowed to say in their official capacity that school children “should be” masked or vaccinated (through a schedule or otherwise) or prohibited from learning in a school building. Such decisions should be left to parents and medical providers. We have learned that when CDC says what people “should” do, it readily becomes a “must” backed by severe punishments, including criminal penalties. CDC should report on the risks and effectiveness of all infectious disease-mitigation measures dispassionately and leave the “should” and “must” policy calls to politically accountable parties.” (Page 454)
How’s that sound in the midst of a pandemic?
Project 2025 also shows open hostility to science and prevention when it comes to Health and Human Services, including no longer enforcing the COVID-19 vaccination mandate on Medicaid and Medicare hospitals. (Page 475).
Another example?
Chapter 3 emphasizes the importance of agricultural scientists in pandemic prevention. In his first term, Trump decimated those very aspects of the Department of Agriculture—proposing to slash them, then shipping them far from Washington. As one expert explained, the impact was devastating: “"The agencies have been decimated. Their ability to perform the functions they were created to perform – it doesn't exist anymore.”
This was part of a broader trend: “There was also hostility in the Trump administration towards science, and so, if you were a federal employee and a science agency, that was the double whammy.”
“Food and farming research took a major hit over the Trump years, and unwinding that damage means restoring decimated agencies and mistreated employees.”
Finally, Trump has already announced that he will “disband the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (OPPR).”
What has that office been dealing with most recently?
You guessed it: “The office most recently responded to an outbreak of bird flu in dairy farms, coordinating with the Food and Drug Administration to ensure milk remains safe to drink, and working with farmers to contain the virus.”
Bottom Line
This is dangerous stuff, folks.
Vance put his disdain for experts on full display in Tuesday's debate.
Trump talks this way all the time.
And Project 2025 lays out the plan to make it all happen.
Make sure people see all of it.
