I’m Canadian and we have our own issues with far right nutjobs but I’ve heard the phrase “Project 2025” thrown around and the little I’ve seen about it frightens me. I don’t follow the news for the sake my mental health but could someone explain it in depth? What kind of a shit show are we looking at? Unfortunately Canadian politics would probably follow because of the huge cultural influence the US has.
There are lots of Federal agencies under the Executive Branch, The heads of those agencies are often political appointees, who are appointed directly by a President and are not expected to remain in their roles if the party in power changes. However, the actual work is done by career civil servants, who are hired based on merit and not their political connections.
Conservatives see this as a problem, because these career civil servants may have been hired by prior administrations, and they see every appointment by the opposition as tainted. They want to wreck the merit-based system that these people are hired under, subject all career government workers to loyalty tests, and fire the ones who don’t meet those tests.
This is, of course, a recipe to decimate the functioning of these agencies and make them totally ineffective. But that’s the whole point. This “deep state” they keep railing about are simply people who put their commitment to the country over their commitment to any one party or one President. So they must go. And it will shrink all these agencies in the process, which they see as a win.
This is an analysis from a Liberal advocacy group but I think it is an accurate description of what these chuckleheads are really up to:
https://www.citizensforethics.org/news/analysis/faq-the-conservative-attack-on-the-merit-based-civil-service/
It’s not even just about the fact that it’s going to wreck those agencies, it also means that there will be substantially less whistle-blowing, and there will be virtually no one working for the government who will raise an alarm or put a stop to anything. When everybody is on board, that creates a substantial amount of power for the executive branch.
What makes it so frightening is that the discussion starts to slide away from the actual functioning of our democratic system and the workings of the executive branch, and starts getting into matters of where power is derived from in a government.
What we have seen is that our Congress is infected by too many friends of fascism, if not fascist themselves. Unless the Democrats have a supermajority in both chambers, Republicans can successfully derail every single thing Congress ever tries to do to reign in an executive branch that’s out of control. Trump was impeached twice, and painfully, obviously guilty both times, and nothing happened because the system has been so fundamentally broken.
Knowing now that Congress can do nothing to stop him, and of course knowing that the court system is captured at this point, Trump will be completely and utterly unafraid of doing anything. The systems in place that would protect us from a renegade executive office will fail to stop him.
Having the entire executive, and every seat in every department filled with loyalists, with nothing in his way that can effectively stop it, is basically a precursor to dictatorship.
And it is something he has spent 4 years trying to do. We’ve seen him cycle through so many people in his administration, that is Trump’s we’re talking here. He’d bring this guy in, he’d last 2 months, then he’d leave. Some people he acquired, lasted just a week and few a day.
It’s because he was wheeling around to find the loyalists he needed that won’t challenge him or feels that they aren’t up to snuff with his requirements. That’s a dangerous precedent to be functioning under as a president. Normally, presidents stick to who they have because they’ve picked carefully and they pick bright minds in the right places. Not a lot of presidents had a lot of great people, but they can say that they were far, far more qualified than anyone Trump has personally assigned.
Even George W. Bush’s administration was better than Trump’s.
But yeah, the 4 years with Trump, will exactly be repeated here in Project 2025. Except, far worse than ever and it’ll all be unchallenged. This isn’t even about trying to play into people’s fears. The 4 years with Trump, he turned this country into his playground. If we have 4 more years of him, he’s going to turn it into his amusement park.
And no I don’t want to hear arguments from people going like “well, it’s only 4 years of him and once it’s over, he can’t run again!”. How the fuck would you know? Has anyone not, by now, seen how he behaves towards laws and rules? He acts like none of those exist to him but exist for others. If impeaching the bastard twice didn’t do anything, do you think he’s going to abide by term limit rules? He might just override that and make himself dictator for the rest of his life.
It’s scary enough that I could see the EU possibly consider striking the US before the fascist war machine can get momentum
The EU can’t even handle Ukraine or keep the UK leaving. There is no one out there to save the US. It goes down it goes down. Might as well have an opinion about the orbit of the moon
Honestly the best summary I’ve read so far and I actually downloaded the PDF 😬
Pretty much this.
Also, say what you will about NY Times, but they had a pretty good summary of this dismantling farily recently, and its implications.
Thanks for this. I had read up on it some time ago, and it seemed like par-for-the-course “paint the government our color once we’re in power” except for a couple concerning points, so when people around here were talking about it like it was literal fascism, I dismissed that as misunderstandings and exaggeration. I hadn’t realized that civil servants were hitherto untouched by the government switching colors.
So it sounds like it’s not literal fascism, but it’s more like… how in some fantasy worlds, higher powers will avoid getting involved in mortal affairs because doing so will give their enemies license to do the same and then the world becomes a mess. It sounds like if Project 2025 happens, then blue’s going to retaliate in kind when they get power back (because otherwise they’re at a major disadvantage,) and it keeps going, majorly hampering the government’s operations. Who wants to get a job that you’re gonna be fired from in 4 years? There’s a chance that blue’s just going to try to hit the undo button, but if red keeps knocking the block tower over and blue keeps rebuilding it, that’s still not going to go very well.
But at the same time… they’ve already stated their willingness to do this. So the damage to the unwritten contract between parties is already done, and the only way to avoid the consequences is to keep blue in power until red redacts, and hope blue doesn’t decide to do it first (which they probably won’t, unless they say something like “the only way to defend against red doing it is to make sure they don’t have their own people in there when they get the power.”)
I don’t like that, though. Sure, blue is generally more reasonable than red, but that’s because they have to be in order to secure votes from reasonable people. If all they need to be is more reasonable than the guys who are literally planning to destroy the government, that’s going to let them get away with some pretty undesirable things. I think a better move would be to try to address the deteriorating two-party dynamics we have. My money’s on Literally Anybody Else.
Well, hopefully since they’re trying to apply this first to the RNC they will run an incompetent campaign and lose.