Project 2025’s Great Replacement
All quotes are taken from Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise unless otherwise identified, and page numbers are indicated in parentheses.
A frightening and brazen plan for an attack on our democracy by a Trump regime, Project 2025 is both predictably conservative and alarmingly radical. Like the MAGA movement itself, it harbors nostalgia for a mythical 1950’s America pre Civil and Women’s Rights when discrimination was rife, legal abortion and contraceptive medication were unavailable, the American population was younger, the average woman was giving birth to more children, and those who didn’t fit heteronormative expectations stayed in their closets.
This 887-page document lays out a host of Republican positions, many of which we have heard before, including smaller government, fewer social services, bigger defense budgets, less regulation, and ignoring climate change to “promote investment in domestic energy, including oil and gas”(709). It also calls for termination of Head Start and the Department of Homeland Security, a “significant reduction or elimination of visas issued to Chinese students or researchers,” the “elimination of racial classifications”(583) in data collected by the Labor Department, and the return to “a biblically based…definition of marriage and family”(480), one that preserves “the male-female dyad”(461), and even elimination of the Department of Education.
Frighteningly, Project 2025 says “the Dobbs decision is just the beginning,”(6) that we all must “accept the givenness of our nature as men and women,” and that “the next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke cultural warriors.”(4) [emphasis mine] To accomplish its anti-Woke agenda, Project 2025 insists that certain words will be deleted from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” Among the terms (surprise!) to be forbidden (“verboten” according to the document) are “gender,” “gender equality,” “gender equity,” “gender awareness,” “gender sensitive,” “abortion,” “reproductive health,” and “reproductive rights.”(259) . The assumption seems to be that eliminating the word will make the issue go away.
The former Trump administration officials and Heritage Foundation members who wrote Project 2025 appear to value the devolution of power from the federal government to state governments, yet they simultaneously advocate that more power be vested in the President, particularly the power to replace civil servants in nearly every branch of government with political appointees committed to “the President’s agenda.”
According to Trump’s brain trust, these demonized civil servants constitute “the Deep State.” In actuality, they are hard working employees from the government spectrum, including technicians at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Russian experts at the CIA and NSA, lawyers at the Antitrust Division, engineers who work for the Army Corps of Engineers, scientists at the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control, economists at the Bureau of Economic Affairs; chemists at the Chemical Safety Board; regulators at Nuclear Regulatory Commission, inspectors at the Food Safety and Inspection Service, and disaster relief experts from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In other words, they’re people our country cannot do without.
It is not easy to decide whether Project 2025’s replacement plan is a crazy recipe for chaos and lawsuits, a vital part of Trump’s promised “retribution,” or the flip side of one the Right’s favorite conspiracy theories, “the Great Replacement.” My money is on all three.
Trumpers who subscribe to the Great Replacement believe that globalists are working to flood predominantly White Christian nations in Europe and North America with young immigrants from South America, the Middle East, and Africa, resulting in a form of White genocide. Remember the Charlottesville demonstrators with tiki torches shouting, “Jews will not replace us.”
This belief and the fear that fuels it indicate the Right’s preference for clearly bound binaries (insider vs. outsider, Christian vs. non-Christian, White vs. Black and Brown, Conservative vs. Liberal, American vs. immigrant, and presumably the legions of Trump loyalists vs. the ordinary nonpartisan civil servants they will replace). The authors of Project 2025 say that their purge will be implemented “on Day One” to “take down the Deep State and return the government to the people.” Although that may sound benign to some, if ever accomplished, this sinister plan would replace a system established on meritocracy and nonpartisanship, however imperfect, with one based on unquestioning partisan loyalty to a leader who considers himself infallible and above the law.
It’s important to note that the transformation of our Civil Service into a collection of inexperienced Trump loyalists is not a newly hatched plan;. In fact, it is the flowering of what Trump tried to realize with his infamous “Schedule F” (Executive Order 13957) signed on October 21, 2020, making it easier for him to hire and fire mid-level federal service employees. Were he to serve a second term, it is hard to predict how many civil servants would be fired, how many would begrudgingly accept a contractor position in exchange for their career ladder appointment, or how many would simply leave.
Is such a large undertaking even feasible? As described in Project 2025, the process would begin swiftly, in some cases even before the Senate has finished its review of top appointees. The vetting of battalions of replacements is already under way. Any candidate committed to execute “the president’s will” can simply go to the Project 2025 website and apply, along with all the other Trump loyalists. If selected, the ardent Trumper will be trained at the Presidential Administrative Academy through “a one-of-a-kind educational and skill-building program designed to prepare and equip future political appointees now to be ready on Day One of the next conservative Administration.”
Wary applicants might do well to be skeptical, considering our former president’s debacle with his last attempt at education, “Trump University.” That folly ended in lawsuits charging the university of defrauding its students, lawsuits that Trump settled by agreeing to pay $25 million. To its credit, Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy does not appear to be a for-profit venture for Trump--just a venture to move him one step closer to the status of autocrat.
The authors of Project 2025 seek to swap our democracy for an authoritarian state, headed by a leader with the immunity our Supreme Court has newly bestowed upon him. And they proudly announce their radical goals. Speaking at a meeting of the National Religious Broadcasters, in Nashville on Feb 22, 2024, Kevin Roberts, the President of the Heritage Foundation, a climate denier, a good friend of JD Vance, and the “architect of Project 2025,” declared that with a Trump win, our country would face a “second American Revolution,” one that will be “bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Sound a little like a threat? It is.
Facing up to the challenge to our Union, President Biden has done everything possible with a divided Congress to protect civil servants from arbitrary firing and to prevent a return to the spoils system of governmental hiring. But the only way to derail the evils of Project 2025 is to vote Democratic and to encourage others to do the same.
There is too much at stake not to.