Project 2025 Lays Out Plan to Dismantle Deep State Under a Conservative President

Tyler O’Neil : Apr 17, 2023
Dailysignal.com

"The great challenge confronting a conservative president is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power—including power currently held by the executive branch—to the American people." -- Russ Vought, former director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Donald Trump

[Daily Signal] – A coalition of conservative leaders and former political appointees has compiled a game plan for the next conservative president to restructure the federal government's bureaucracy to make it more cost effective, high-performing, and accountable to the people.  (Screengrab Image)

"The great challenge confronting a conservative president is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power—including power currently held by the executive branch—to the American people," Russ Vought, former director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Donald Trump, writes in the book "Mandate for Leadership," compiled by the 2025 Presidential Transition Project. Copies of his report on the Executive Office of the President and the report on "Central Personnel Agencies" were provided exclusively to The Daily Signal for this article.

The Heritage Foundation helped launch the 2025 Presidential Transition Project (also known as Project 2025) to avoid the pitfalls Trump faced in 2017. The incoming president struggled to keep his promises to the American people, facing stiff headwinds from a hostile federal bureaucracy Trump often referred to as "the deep state." The project aims to equip an incoming conservative president with policies to rein in this bureaucracy. (The Daily Signal is The Heritage Foundation's news outlet.)

While the Constitution makes it "abundantly clear" that the executive power of the US government "is not vested in departments or agencies" but in the president himself, Vought warns that "a president today assumes office to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences—or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly 'woke' faction of the country."

Vought encourages some changes to the Executive Office of the President of the United States—notably the elimination of the pro-abortion and pro-transgender Gender Policy Council—but the bulk of recommendations for combatting the deep state appear in the report on "Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy." Paul Dans, former chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management under Trump and director of Project 2025 at The Heritage Foundation, co-wrote the report with Ronald Reagan-era OPM Director Donald Devine and Trump-era OPM staffer Dennis Dean Kirk, Project 2025's associate director for personnel policy.

Dans, Devine and Kirk urge a future conservative president to reinstate many of Trump's executive orders and issue new ones. A future president should speed up the time it takes to discipline and fire employees; restrict the power of public-sector unions; bring the salaries of federal employees more in line with private-sector workers; reassign entrenched federal employees to "Schedule F," thereby making them at-will and easier to fire; and work to prevent members of the outgoing administration from "burrowing in."

The status quo

Dans, Devine and Kirk trace the problem of unaccountable bureaucracy back to the progressive movement of the 20th century, which aimed to elevate professional and scientific bureaucrats. This had serious "unintended consequences," such as making it difficult to reward good employees, hard to analyze applicants, and "almost impossible to fire all but the most incompetent civil servants."

Federal employees often win big bonuses, even amid scandal, the authors warn. Veterans Administration executives who encouraged false reporting of waiting lists for hospital administration during the administration of Barak Obama nonetheless received "outstanding" ratings, for example. Pay increases have become automatic rather than based on performance.

To make matters worse, management cannot screen applicants for basic qualifications such as intelligence.

Under President Jimmy Carter, the Department of Justice and OPM lawyers signed a legal consent decree eliminating civil service IQ examinations, based on the claim that IQ tests discriminated on the basis of race. "Courts have ruled that even without evidence of overt, intentional discrimination, such results might suggest discrimination," the authors note. Congress or a future administration will have to end the doctrine of disparate impact to resolve this problem.

An entrenched bureaucracy also hampers the will of the people.

While both Republican and Democratic administrations have aimed to "infiltrate political appointees improperly into the high career civil service," Democratic efforts have tended to succeed because "they require the cooperation of careerists, who generally lean heavily to the Left."

The Project 2025 authors, who have extensive experience in government, warn that career staff reserve "excessive numbers of key policy positions as 'career reserved' to deny them" to political appointees. In practice, this means that Trump's appointees could not direct federal policy because entrenched staff from Obama undermined the duly-elected president's initiatives. Career staff also dominate personnel evaluation boards and lead training efforts that can undermine the administration's goals.

1. Streamline the firing process

Firing bad employees requires a herculean effort, the authors note. They recommend restructuring the process of disciplining and terminating federal workers.

Trump signed an executive order in 2018 requiring agencies to speed up the process of correcting, disciplining, or firing employees who underperform, but Biden overturned that order. The report encourages reinstating it.

If a private-sector employee faces termination, he or she often has a simple two-step process to appeal it, while federal employees facing termination have a cornucopia of alphabet-soup options to appeal. They can appeal to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Federal Labor Relations Authority, or the Office of Special Counsel—and employees often "shop" for a friendly venue, the report notes. 

A conservative president should streamline the process by making the Merit Systems Protection Board the main reviewer of adverse employment actions, the authors argue.

2. Curb union power

Public-sector unions help explain how the bureaucracy has become so entrenched, the report claims. Even Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt considered federal government union representation incompatible with democracy, in part because strikes would amount to acts against the people. Yet President John F. Kennedy recognized federal union representation and President Jimmy Carter set public-sector bargaining in law as part of an agreement with Congress to pass the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, a reform that itself has been undermined, the authors lament.

Over time, federal agencies narrowed management rights, even though they still exist in law. A conservative president should reinstitute those rights, the report urges.

Trump issued three executive orders to restrain union abuses: one encouraging agencies to renegotiate all collective bargaining agreements, another encouraging agencies to prevent union representatives from using official time for union activity, and one more encouraging agencies to limit labor grievances and prioritize performance over seniority. Biden revoked these orders, but the report urges a future president to reinstate them...Subscribe for free to Breaking Christian News here

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