On Oct. 24, the Tufts Federalist Society hosted an event entitled “Is Project 2025 a Threat to Democracy?: A Dialogue.” It was a debate between Samuel Gebru, a Tufts political science professor of the practice, and Jonathan Wolfson, chief legal officer and policy director of the Cicero Institute, a Texas-based think tank. Wolfson, who had served as policy director in the Department of Labor during the first Trump administration, argued that Project 2025 is not a threat, while Gebru argued otherwise.
Started prior to President-elect Donald Trump being confirmed as the Republican nominee, Project 2025 is a presidential transition project for “the next conservative president,” overseen by the Heritage Foundation, a well-known conservative think tank. Although Trump tried to distance himself from Project 2025 during his campaign, his team is now reportedly taking suggestions from the Project 2025 team regarding potential appointees for the new administration.
Although the debate took place over a month ago, I wanted to write an article about it because a critical piece of the debate — whether or not Project 2025 is a “threat to democracy” — was not given sufficient attention. Critically, Project 2025 says that the federal civil service, which the authors term the “administrative state” and which is also known to some on the right as the “deep state,” poses a great danger to the American democratic system. This is where I believe the true threat to democracy lies.
But first, a little background is necessary to fully understand the issue. The federal government employs roughly 2.4 million civilian workers. These civil servants are unelected officials, not political appointees. They include employees at every federal agency and office, from those who work at the Food and Drug Administration to rangers in the National Park Service. President of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin D. Roberts, writes in the Foreword to Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership” that “most policy is no longer set by Congress at all, but by the Administrative State.” As a result, “the federal government is growing larger and less constitutionally accountable — even to the President — every year.” Thus, Roberts makes the civil service out to be stymieing the democratic process at the federal level and ignoring the wishes of the people who elected the president in the first place.
Trump certainly thought the same and devised a way to root out precisely those employees. He tried to implement that at the very end of his first term by issuing Executive Order 13957, which reclassified these employees — about 50,000 — as effectively at-will employees who could be fired at any time, for any reason. These are the same employees that Roberts identifies as the perpetrators of the “administrative state.”
The interesting thing about Project 2025 is that it assumes that the president can just enact this kind of bureaucratic purging because doing so is constitutional. However, the constitutionality of such an act is incredibly controversial. Such propositions hinge on the Unitary Executive Theory, which posits that the president has complete control over the Executive Branch, using Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution that vests executive power in the president as justification. Proponents of the more extreme version of this theory argue that this control extends over so-called “independent agencies,” which are technically housed within the Executive Branch, yet upon their creation were not designated by Congress as serving “at the pleasure of the president,” which means that their employees cannot be dismissed at any time. Such independent agencies include the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve. Project 2025 supports bringing these independent agencies under the purview of the president in order to “[dismantle] this rogue administrative state.” But in order to really accomplish their goals, it is likely that the Supreme Court would need to first rule on the constitutionality of bringing independent agencies under direct control of the executive.
Although the unitary executive theory has been invoked in the past, starting properly during former President Ronald Reagan’s presidency, using the theory to justify purging the civil service would result in a radical shift in the way that the American government functions if enacted. Although Trump’s executive order does not explicitly mention using the reclassification to punish political disloyalty, the idea for it was conceived in response to many federal workers’ opposition to Trump’s agenda. Thus, it makes sense that one of this policy’s main effects would be to create a loyalty test for federal employees, whom the president can fire if they do not pass that test.
In saying all of this, I do not mean to insinuate that partisanship is synonymous with ill will. Rather, I want to drive home the point that, in a country which was founded in order to escape tyrannical rule, it seems worrying that enforcement of a partisan agenda should be a prerequisite to holding certain positions in government organizations that provide essential leadership and service for the American people. And perhaps most ironically, a poll conducted by the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan think tank, found that 87% of Americans agree that “having a nonpartisan civil service is important for having a strong American democracy.” It seems as though the very people who champion gutting the bureaucratic state in the name of increasing the president’s ability to carry out what he or she promised to supporters, might actually be going against the wishes of the majority of the American population.
Even if you weren’t in attendance at the Federalist Society’s event, you should care about this issue because all of us have benefited from the U.S. democratic system and the protections it affords. It is true that American democracy is an old, long-lasting institution that cannot be undone overnight, and is likely far less prone to autocracy than other less developed democracies. However, that does not mean that damage done from within — which may not immediately be visible to the public eye — will not have a negative impact on our democracy’s overall ability to properly serve its constituents. As the next Trump administration gets under way in January, I encourage everyone to keep close watch over attempts to expand the power of the Executive Branch, because our democratic system is one well worth protecting.
