Former President Donald Trump has vowed to finish “draining the swamp”—eliminating special interests and bad actors from the federal government—and make it easier to fire “rogue bureaucrats” who undermine presidential policies.
Other Republican candidates have even bolder plans to attack the so-called administrative state by eliminating entire federal agencies.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis would close the IRS and the U.S. Departments of Education, Commerce, and Energy. Former Vice President Mike Pence would shutter the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education, and “clean house” at the Department of Justice (DOJ).
Any of those aims would be abetted by the efforts of a cadre of former Trump staffers who have created a detailed transition plan aimed at dismantling the administrative state beginning on the first day of the next presidential term.
Project 2025 is both a policy agenda and recruitment effort intended to reshape the federal bureaucracy by instituting sweeping policy changes and replacing tens of thousands of federal workers with vetted, trained, ideologically conservative employees ready to execute an extreme makeover of the executive branch.
Project 2025 is detailed in “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.” The nearly 1,000 page tome was written by a broad coalition of conservative thinkers and activists to seize what they call a “last opportunity to save our republic.”
The group is close to its goal of attracting almost 20,000 potential federal employees who are willing to move to Washington and reshape the government in the mold of modern conservatism, Associate Director Spencer Chretien told The Epoch Times.
“We are doing the next president’s work ahead of time, and expect many of our ideas, people, and plans to become a part of the next conservative administration,” regardless of which conservative candidate is elected, Mr. Chretien said.
“We plan to dismantle the deep state, not the government,” he added said, referring to unelected government employees and business leaders who influence U.S. policy.
That may be easier said than done, according to some constitutional law experts. They point out that the president alone has limited power to institute wholesale change of the kind imagined by Project 2025 and its sponsor organization, The Heritage Foundation.
Others believe the constitutional theory underlying the plan, if allowed to stand by the courts, could further weaken the Republic it aims to save, paving the way for an authoritarian presidency of the kind feared by the Framers of the Constitution.
