Project 2025 on Presidential Power: It’s Unlimited

“We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be.” – Leader of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts

Project 2025 imagines a country where executive power rests entirely in the president. If implemented, the president could fire any federal employee and replace them with a partisan loyalist. They could weaponize the Justice Department against perceived enemies.

Federal employees who, for the entire history of the United States, have focused on serving the public in a nonpartisan way regardless of the administration would become tools of the president and could be fired for not following a command, even if that command were illegal. Entire departments would be dismantled and replaced by loyalists.

This plan, combined with the recent Supreme Court decision giving presidents almost unlimited immunity, is a dangerous recipe for a politics of vengeance that harms all Americans. Here is what Project 2025 has to say about reshaping the federal government.

If Project 2025 is implemented, the United States would be unrecognizable. Instead, it would resemble autocracies around the world. – CAP

Politicizing the Government at Every Level

The extreme right-wing position on presidential power expressed in Project 2025 is known as the unitary executive. It unconstitutionally claims that almost all power over federal agencies—including congressionally designated independent agencies—rests in the executive. In practice, the means the president can fire anyone on a whim who they disagree with. It drastically changes the work of public service and politicizes all federal agencies.

Project 2025 vests these powers in the president because it envisions implementing an extreme anti-regulation, corporatist agenda with no congressional guardrails.

Donald Trump’s own Agenda 47 calls for “on Day One issuing an executive order restoring the president’s authority to fire rogue bureaucrats.” Or, in non-Trump speak, anyone he doesn’t like.

Slashing the Federal Workforce

The plan’s effort to replace career public servants with political activists includes gutting the federal workforce. While the plan offers few specifics, analysts estimate over 1 million jobs would be lost, sacrificing the economy for the sake of partisan politics.

Schedule F

Schedule F is an executive order issued by Donald Trump in 2020 and rescinded by President Biden in 2021 that removes protections for federal employees and allows the president to fire career government employees for partisan reasons. It dovetails with Project 2025’s plan to place as many as 50,000 conservative movement activists in federal positions.

Destroying Checks and Balances

In addition to granting the president immunity from criminal actions, the Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo that ended Chevron deference gave federal judges the ability to question Congress’s intent and federal agencies’ authority in regulatory matters. This, coupled with the politicization of all federal agencies, destroys the system of checks and balances on which American democracy rests.

The effects of these things in combination would make America unrecognizable.

It would allow the president to weaponize the Department of Justice for political purposes. Donald Trump has claimed that his success can be measured by his retribution against his enemies. And his enemies include journalists, television stations, immigrants, Democrats, judges and many other Americans who would be in jeopardy under this scenario. Donald Trump has also said he would use the Insurrection Act to unleash the military and National Guard on American citizens to stifle dissent.

A tool favored by authoritarians is to use state powers to tarnish the reputations of political opponents—and remove them from civic life—by investigating and arresting them for criminal activity. – CAP

It would allow the president to end the independence of independent agencies and circumvent Congress’ constitutionally vested power to allocate federal funds.

Countries don’t become dictatorships overnight. They slip into authoritarianism under the guise of democratic reforms. Project 2025 is a major slip into an authoritarian United States.