After more than a month of Trump 2.0, I think we can all agree that America is not on the way to becoming "Great Again." In fact, it's been quite a wild ride. I'm happy to see people pushing back, standing up, and speaking out now that we've all gotten over the shock and awe of Trump's first few weeks.
It turns out the one thing Americans still have in common is we don't like government taking things from us. It feels like all this administration has done is take. They're taking federal jobs. They're taking the Department of Education. They're taking USAID. They're taking research funding to fight diseases and find new breakthroughs. They're taking away our confidence in air travel, health information, and food and drug safety. For undocumented immigrants, they're even taking your freedom. Each day, more Americans are realizing that this is NOT what we signed up for. Well ...
In reality, some Americans DID sign up for this. In fact, they're living their best lives as the economy melts down around us because they are getting EXACTLY what they wanted. These people are members of the ultra-conservative movement behind Project 2025.
In last week's piece "A House Divided," I wrote about the importance of Project 2025 and explained that I'm working on a series about it's implementation during Trump's first hundred days. Now, I'm proud to share the first installment of what will likely be a ten-part series that I'm calling "When Project 2025 Came to Town." Here's a roadmap for the path we will take ...
Each installment of When Project 2025 Came to Town will cover detailed plans for overhauling one or more federal government agencies taken straight from the Project 2025 playbook. Then we'll compare those plans with the concrete actions Trump has taken in office so far. We'll also highlight any pushback that may be happening and discuss what regular people can do to thwart these plans.
Now let's get to the meat and potatoes of our first installment, "What is the 'Administrative State?'"
Most people have never heard of the term "administrative state." I'm a political expert, and the first time I heard it was at the beginning of Trump's first term when a guy named Steve Bannon used it at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference. The Washington Post actually called him "the reclusive mastermind behind President Trump’s nationalist ideology and combative tactics" in a 2017 article named "Bannon vows a daily fight for ‘deconstruction of the administrative state.’"
When most people think about all of the rules that govern our daily lives, they tend to focus on the Constitution, the laws passed by Congress, and the statutes passed by legislators in their states. They may also think about Supreme Court decisions and presidential executive orders. However, people rarely include regulations created by federal government agencies. The food safety standards we all depend on, for example, are set by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is one of hundreds of federal agencies created to serve to the American people.
"The administrative state" is simply a collective term for all of these agencies and the people who work for them. In fact, Project 2025 says this explicitly: "The term Administrative State refers to the policymaking work done by the bureaucracies of all the federal government's departments, agencies, and millions of employees."
It turns out Bannon wasn't some rogue Batman villain after all. He was just saying the quiet part out loud. A few years after his CPAC speech, the authors of Project 2025 figured out that if you really want to hide something from the American people, you just need to put it in a book. Project 2025 is an instruction manual for overhauling American politics and society. It includes four main goals, and one of them is to "dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the people."
Why in the world would anyone want to "deconstruct" or "dismantle" government agencies that were created to serve the American people? Project 2025 provides us with a very detailed answer to this question, including two main reasons:
1. Questioning their legitimacy
It may be hard to believe this, but there are millions of Americans who don't believe agencies like the FDA, FAA, IRS, CDC, NIH, etc. actually do anything to help people. They think these agencies are filled with "unelected bureaucrats" who waste the taxpayers' money and only make our lives more difficult.
I know it sounds like I'm exaggerating, but in the words of Levar Burton, you don't have to take my word for it. Project 2025 states it plainly:
"The surest way to put the federal government back to work for the American people is to reduce its size and scope back to something resembling the original constitutional intent. Conservatives desire a smaller government not for its own sake, but for the sake of human flourishing. ...
The next conservative President must possess the courage to relentlessly put the interests of the everyday American over the desires of the ruling elite. Their outrage cannot be prevented; it must simply be ignored. And it can be. The Left derives its power from the institutions they control. But those institutions are only powerful to the extent that constitutional officers surrender their own legitimate authority to them. A President who refuses to do so and uses his or her office to reimpose constitutional authority over federal policymaking can begin to correct decades of corruption and remove thousands of bureaucrats from the positions of public trust they have so long abused."
That's right. The ultra-conservative movement behind Project 2025 has convinced itself that federal agencies and the people who work for them are the tyranny our Founding Fathers were trying to protect us from. They think eliminating these agencies and terminating their workers will somehow increase our freedom.
Basically, their argument is that none of these agencies are included in the Constitution. They say the Constitution gives policymaking authority to Congress and the President only; therefore, all the regulations created by federal agencies are illegitimate. However, this isn't their only problem with the administrative state.
2. Old-fashioned old party politics
The ultra-conservative movement behind Project 2025 has also convinced itself that millions of federal workers are all Democrats working to advance left-wing causes. Once again, I'll let Project 2025's authors speak for themselves:
"Unaccountable federal spending is the secret lifeblood of the Great Awokening. Nearly every power center held by the Left is funded or supported, one way or another, through the bureaucracy of Congress. Colleges and school districts are funded by tax dollars. The Administrative State holds 100 percent of its power at the sufferance of Congress, and its insulation from presidential discipline is an unconstitutional fairy tale spun by the Washington Establishment to protect its turf. ... Cultural institutions like public libraries and public health agencies are only as 'independent' from public accountability as elected officials and voters permit."
Believe it or not, they think all the subject-matter experts, scientists, accountants, researchers, park rangers, and other federal employees in America are working together to pursue a left-wing agenda. They feel this imaginary "deep state" oppressing them every time they hear about vaccines, climate change, diversity, abortion, transgender people, or immigrants. Of course, this is absurd. Every FBI agent, IRS agent, park ranger, VA employee, etc. across America is definitely not a Democrat. In fact, a random sample of federal employees was polled in 2022, and their self-reported political affiliation was half Republican.
I don't want to insult the conservative writers, researchers, and strategists that clearly put a lot of time and effort into writing Project 2025, but it's pretty crazy that they have built an entire movement around such a fundamentally flawed assumption. I highlighted a line in one of the quotes I shared above: "Their outrage cannot be prevented; it must simply be ignored" because it's an unbelievably callous reference to fired federal workers. As we watch hundreds of thousands of Americans lose their jobs and prepare for hundreds of thousands more firings in the days and weeks to come, think about the fact that the people supporting this assumed it would all be Democrats.
Eight years ago, when Trump was elected the first time, he didn't have any real plans. He had a few ideas that he floated on the campaign trail, but he had no real policy goals, and this was something he was viciously mocked for. The idea of "infrastructure week" became a running joke, and John McCain famously saved Obamacare because the Republicans had no viable replacement. The one thing we all know about Donald Trump is how much he hates to be mocked. That's why I'm sure he was more than happy to accept Project 2025 as a ready-made agenda for his second administration.
Once you understand that Project 2025 is the playbook he's been following, Trump's actions over the past month start to make a lot more sense. His goal is to eliminate as many executive branch agencies as possible and decimate the rest through mass layoffs, forced resignations, and incompetent leadership.
You may have noticed that Trump is not exactly hiring the "best people" to lead our government's most important departments and agencies. Remember, Project 2025 says these agencies are illegitimate and filled with political enemies. If that's what you believe, then you don't really care who leads these agencies or what happens to the people who work there. Ultimately, you want to get rid of them, so the last thing you need is some self-righteous civil servant who works for the deep state standing in your way.
To be honest, I tried to find a concrete number of terminations so far to share with you, but no official total has been released, news outlet estimates vary wildly, and more people are losing their jobs every hour of every day. The best estimate I've seen so far is over 200,000 from ABC News, and Musk shows no signs of slowing down. Unfortunately, these firings will continue. They may even ramp up in the coming days as Trump doubles down on reorganizing the federal government. I'll get into more details about what's happening in each cabinet department as we move through the When Project 2025 Came to Town series. Since I'm an educator, we'll start next week with Trump's plans for America's education system.
If Project 2025 is a playbook, and Trump is its quarterback, then what is Elon Musk doing? Well, that's where things get interesting.
Project 2025 is a guide for completely overhauling American politics and society, but it does not include step-by-step instructions. It was written in 2023 when Joe Biden was President, so ironically, it spends quite a bit of time complaining about the tyranny of presidential executive orders and urging Congress to "take its power back" from the Executive Branch. Conveniently, congressional Republicans started ignoring this part of Project 2025 as soon as Trump was elected.
Trump may have adopted Project 2025's goals, but a tiger can't change its stripes. We know from his first term that Trump gets very involved in campaigning, but is less interested in the daily tasks of governance. That's why it makes perfect sense for him to delegate those tasks to someone else. From Trump's perspective, Musk is the perfect choice. The two share a similar worldview, and both have larger-than-life personas. They also both have an axe to grind with the federal government. Trump gets a chance to reward his top campaign donor with a key role in his new administration, and most people think the guy is some super genius who can use technology to help him "dismantle the administrative state."
Even Trump's most enthusiastic supporters have to admit that things aren't going very well with his government reorganization effort. Despite its inefficiencies, the federal government is incredibly important to the everyday lives of average Americans. Federal agencies do a ton of important work, and their employees are hardworking Americans just like the rest of us. It turns out that federal employees are not working together to advance a nefarious political agenda. Half of them are Republicans, and they all just want to do their jobs and live their lives like everyone else.
Once all the conspiracy theories meet the harsh light of reality, they start to fall apart. We're starting to see this in Republican town halls across the country. The only question now is what will happen next? Will Trump keep barreling forward with his plan to dismantle the administrative state or will he cave and fire Musk to get voters back on his side? We shall see ...
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