The project itself consists of a public policy framework, containing both broad ideological outlines and specific implementation details. Its authors have divided it into several phases: the initial policy document, titled Mandate for Leadership, which they have released publicly, then a series of training videos, which have been leaked to ProPublica, and a number of other as yet unpublished documents.
How many of the policy prescriptions of Project 2025 an administration headed by Donald Trump would attempt to enact, and how many of those Congress would agree to, we do not know. However, we do know Donald Trump accepts one of the core proposals of project 2025, because he attempted to implement a similar policy in the waning days of 2020.
This policy, titled with the anodyne "schedule F", aims to convert wide swaths of American civil service positions from non-partisan employees of the American people to partisan political appointments. For large numbers of workers, particularly those in senior positions tasked with decision making, political alignment would replace qualifications and experience. Rather than working for the American people and seeking solutions based on the best information available, the new cohort of government employees would be oriented and encouraged to see themselves as the implementers of the preferences of the conservative movement.
Americans have attempted this experiment before. It was done away with in the United States by the Pendleton Act after a disappointed office seeker, who believed his political services should have won him a job, murdered President Garfield. However, we have a more recent example of what can happen when political loyalties and personal connections outweigh competence, and it does not bode well for the United States if Donald Trump regains the presidency.
In 2003, the Bush Administration set out to free Iraq from Saddam Hussein's dictatorship; a freedom offered, of course, on American terms. Despite having had a year and a half between the atrocities of 9/11 and the actual invasion of Iraq, the aftermath of the invasion devolved into complete confusion. As the Americans scrambled to staff a transitional government for Iraq, the "Coalition Provisional Authority", the ideologues who had pressed hardest for the invasion promoted a hiring program based on connections and political alignments, not ability.
A PBS Frontline interview describes one such case:
...there's a guy named Skip Burkle, who's an assistant administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development [USAID]. Skip is described by his colleagues as one of the foremost experts in post-conflict public health around the world. It was his job to rehabilitate Iraq's health care system. Burkle has a medical degree, four postgraduate degrees. He's got purple hearts. He served in Kosovo and in Somalia, in Haiti.
But a week into it he gets an e-mail from his senior official back in Washington, a friend of his, saying the White House wants a loyalist on the job, and in his place was a guy named Jim Haveman. He was no doctor. He was the director of community health in Michigan. His pal, the Republican governor of Michigan, John Engler, contacted Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services. He contacted Paul Wolfowitz and said, "Hey, this guy Haveman would be really good."
Haveman's international experience really was limited to sort of doing outreach for the Dutch Reform Church. He had worked previously at an adoption agency where they encouraged children not to have abortions. He'd never worked in the Middle East. He never had any experience in post-conflict health care. But he was the guy the administration saw fit to send out there.
The results of this process of replacing the competent with the loyal were not as bad as could be expected; they were a lot worse. In The Mess They Made *, the political commentator Gwynne Dyer described the effect on Iraq's reconstruction in economic terms. Rebuilding an economy devastated by sanctions and war required money, and $23 billion US Dollars was available from seized Iraqi assets released by the UN, along with $18.4 billion USD appropriated by the US Congress. Dyer describes how incompetent oversight led to that money being squandered and stolen; his deadpan recitation of the devastating record of massive incompetence and rampant theft lapses into a kind of mordant humour:
...Another $1.4 billion was flown from Baghdad to the Kurdish regional government in Irbil, and has not been seen since. And the 8.8 billion that passed through the new government ministries during the reign of the CPA has never been accounted for, and there is little prospect of finding out where it went. The [Iraqi] Defence Ministry's $13-billion procurement budget for 2005 vanished completely, together with the defence minister and the procurement chief: "It is possibly one of the biggest thefts in history," said Ali Allawi, finance minister at the time.... It is likely that more money was stolen during the first year of the occupation of Iraq than Mobutu Sese Seko managed to steal in thirty-two years of looting the Congo. (pages 16-17)
This record of malfeasance is bad enough, but its results were far worse: the scale of the theft, combined with incompetence at all levels of the coalition provision authority, meant hospitals kept in squalor, children going uneducated, electrical systems failing, and sectarian communities fighting over the available scraps. Even with the best possible administration, the reconstruction of Iraq would have been extremely difficult; with staff so incompetent and inexperienced that, as Dyer and others reported, the US military contemptuously dubbed the Coalition Provisional Authority "children playing adults", a catastrophic insurgency became inevitable.
Such a catastrophe is not inevitable with the proposed "schedule F" for the American civil service, but neither is it impossible. Even with large swaths of the American civil service given over to political loyalists for whom opinions on abortion, slavery,and girl's sports rank higher than competence, the United States has more effective safeguards against theft of government funds than prevailed in the chaos of post-invasion Iraq. Then again, the scale of United States government spending is vastly greater; to match the scale of theft seen in Iraq, thieves would have to make off with less than half of one percent of the US federal budget. The money Americans pay in taxes deserves competent stewardship. Americans deserve civil servants who work for them, not ideologues working far a cause.
I for one hope Americans vote to keep a competent and non-partisan civil service this November.
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