Quinn LiPuma is a junior majoring in Political Theory and Constitutional Democracy in MSU’s James Madison College. During his summer internship with WCDP, Quinn will write short explanatory pieces for us about the Heritage Foundation’s terrifying but little-understood blueprint for American fascism, titled Project 2025. This is the first piece in Quinn’s series.
Brief overview: In April 2023, extremist Republican operatives, “scholars,” and politicians published their vision for what America should aspire to be, and how the next “conservative” leader should achieve those aims, in a 1,000-page document fancily titled, “The Mandate for Leadership,” also called Project 2025. However, upon reading it, it becomes clear very quickly that this is less a mandate for leadership and more a mandate for dictatorship, thinly veiled behind obscure philosophical language and the sheer size of the document. As the weeks go by before election day, we here at the WCDP will provide a weekly debunking of the major talking points, as well as explain why this project absolutely matters, why it can happen here, and why an alarmist viewpoint is entirely reasonable.
To open our debunking here, let us examine the way this is being framed by those right-wing operatives. Before even reading the document, the website touting it says, “Our goal is to assemble an army of . . . prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.” Do you, the reader, remember during the Trump administration when he seemed to fire top advisors nearly every other week? Well, you’re not imagining it. His turnover rate was 92% because none of his advisors could, or would, perform his dangerous demands. They were blocked in part due to the “Administrative State” vilified by Project 2025: the thousands of federal workers who put their country and their jobs over politics.
So the prologue to this “Mandate for Leadership” is, essentially, saying that all those pesky little bureaucratic ants standing in the way of their radical plans should be removed. Some 50,000 federal workers, whose careers are centered around keeping the government running efficiently, and who, as civil servants, have long enjoyed robust protections from political change, would be reclassified as political appointees. Those holding those positions could therefore be fired if they dared to object to the President’s orders, and replaced with people who will obey the President, regardless of the outcome.
This reclassification of nonpartisan civil service positions into political positions clears the path for implementation of the rest of Project 2025. They are dead serious; we should be too.