More than a year to go 2024 Electiona group of conservative groups are preparing possible second white house term For Donald Trump, he recruited thousands of Americans to Washington on a mission to dismantle the federal government and replace it with a vision closer to his own.
Led by the long-established Heritage Foundation think tank and driven by former think tanks trump card For administration officials, the far-reaching effort essentially awaits the former president’s second-term administration — or any candidate who fits their ideals and can beat the president joe biden 2024.
With a nearly 1,000-page “Plan 2025” playbook and an “army” of Americans, the idea is to put the civic infrastructure in place on day one to expropriate, reshape and dismantle the “deep state” that Republicans deride. State” bureaucracy, in part by laying off as many as 50,000 federal workers.
“We need an influx of conservatives into the region,” said Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project and a former Trump administration official, speaking of the cause with historic flamboyance.
“This is the clarion call to come to Washington,” he said. “People need to put down their tools, step away from their professional lives and say, ‘This is my lifetime of service.'”
The unprecedented effort, orchestrated by dozens of right-wing groups, many of them new in Washington, represents a shift in the approach of conservatives, who have traditionally sought to constrain the federal government by: cut federal taxes and cut federal spending.
Instead, Trump-era conservatives want to dismantle the “administrative state” from within, expelling federal employees they see as obstacles to the president’s agenda and replacing them with like-minded officials more eager to implement the new executive’s style of governing.
The goal is to avoid the pitfalls of Trump’s first years in office, when the Republican president’s team was ill-prepared and his Cabinet nominees struggling to secure Senate confirmation The policy has met resistance from lawmakers, government workers and even Trump’s own appointees who refuses to bend Either break the agreement, or in some cases the law, in order to achieve his goals.
While many of the proposals in the 2025 plan were inspired by Trump, they were also echoed by other countries republican rival Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy are gaining popularity among other Republicans.
If Trump wins a second term, the legacy coalition’s work will ensure the president will have the people to move forward with his unfinished business in the White House.
“The president’s first day in office is going to be a devastating blow to the executive state,” said Russ Vought, a former Trump administration official who is involved in the effort and now president of the conservative Center for American Renaissance.
Much of the new president’s agenda will be achieved by reinstating so-called “Schedule F” — a Trump-era executive order that would reclassify tens of thousands of the 2 million federal workers as essential. workers who can be fired at will.
Biden repealed the executive order when he took office in 2021, but Trump and other presidential candidates have now vowed to restore it.
“It scares me,” said Mary Guy, a professor of public administration at the University of Colorado, who warned that the idea would lead to a return to the political spoils system.
Experts believe Schedule F would create chaos in the civil service, which was overhauled during President Jimmy Carter’s administration in an attempt to ensure the professionalization of the workforce and end political bias dating back to the 19th century.
Currently, only 4,000 federal workers are considered political appointees, and they typically change with each administration. But Schedule F could put tens of thousands of jobs at risk.
“Our democracy is at risk of suicide. Schedule F is just one more bullet in the gun,” Guy said.
The ideas contained in the Heritage Foundation’s coffee-table read are as ambitious as they are narrow, blending long-standing conservative policies with strikingly stark, puzzling proposals of the Trump era .
The Justice Department is undergoing “top-to-bottom reforms,” specifically limiting its independence and ending the FBI’s efforts to combat the spread of misinformation. It called for increased prosecution of anyone offering or distributing abortion pills by mail.
It has been suggested that the Pentagon “repeal” its recent diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, the program’s so-called “wake-up” agenda, and reinstate military veterans who refused to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
The pages, chapter by chapter, provide the next president with a how-to manual, similar to the one Legacy magazine published 50 years ago before the Ronald Reagan administration. Written by some of the most prominent thinkers in the conservative movement today, the book is often sprinkled with apocalyptic language.
A chapter written by Trump’s former acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security called for increasing the number of political appointees and redeploying law enforcement-capable office personnel to the field “to maximize law enforcement capacity.”
At the White House, the book suggested that the new administration should “revisit” the tradition of providing workspace for the press corps and ensure that white house adviser “Firmly committed” to the president’s agenda.
Conservatives have long been pessimistic about the federal office, complaining that it is crowded with liberals intent on blocking the Republican agenda.
But Doreen Greenwald, national president of the state Treasury Employees union, said most federal workers live in the states and are your neighbors, family and friends. “Federal employees are not the enemy,” she said.
While presidents typically rely on Congress to implement policy, the Legacy Project leans toward what legal scholars call a unity of executive power view, in which the president has broad powers to act alone.
To thwart senators who would try to block the president’s cabinet nominations, Plan 2025 proposes appointing senior allies to executive positions, as has been done during the Trump administration to bypass the Senate confirmation process.
John McEntee, another former Trump official who has advised on the effort, said the next administration could be “a little bit tougher than what we’ve done with Congress.”
Indeed, the role of Congress would be diminished — for example, a proposal to cancel congressional notification of certain foreign arms sales.
Philip Wallach, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies the separation of powers and was not involved with the legacy project, said there is a degree of “illusion” about the president’s competence.
“Some of these visions do start to seep into some sort of authoritarian fantasy that the president wins the election, so he’s in charge, so everybody has to do what he says — and that’s not the system of government we live in,” he said.
In the legacy office, Dans has a faded photograph of an early Washington on the wall, and the White House sits almost alone in the city, surrounded by dirt streets on all sides.
It’s the image conservatives have long craved: a smaller federal government.
Traditional leagues are conducting hiring efforts across the country to fill federal job openings. They staffed and signed up hundreds of people at this month’s Iowa State Fair, and they’re building a database of potential hires they’re inviting for training in how the government works.
“It’s counterintuitive,” Dance admits — the idea of joining the government to shrink — but says it’s a lesson learned from the Trump era about what it takes to “regain control.”
Svlook
