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The original was posted on /r/keep_track by /u/rusticgorilla on 2023-11-30 19:04:01.

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Project 2025 is a far-right plan to transition the U.S. federal government into an authoritarian dictatorship should a Republican win next year’s election. The project, led by the Heritage Foundation, was crafted with the implicit expectation that Donald Trump will be the GOP nominee.

Key officials in Trump’s former administration are also involved in Project 2025: Ken Cuccinelli, former Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security; Rick Dearborne, Trump’s former Deputy Chief of Staff; Christopher Miller, former acting Secretary of Defense; Peter Navarro, former Assistant to the President and former Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy; and Russ Vought, former Director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Unitary executive theory

The broad strokes of Project 2025 are undergirded by the unitary executive theory, which holds that the President of the United States possesses the power to control the entire federal executive branch—no other branch can act as a check or balance on executive power. Lawyers in the Reagan administration advanced the theory in order to centralize control over the executive branch and refuse to comply with congressional oversight.

Reagan’s notion was that only a strong president would be able to dramatically limit big government. Perhaps drawing on a model for unitary corporate leadership in which the CEO also serves as chairman of the board, the so-called unitary executive promised undivided presidential control of the executive branch and its agencies, expanded unilateral powers and avowedly adversarial relations with Congress.

In the years that followed, Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society conservatives worked to provide a constitutional cover for this theory, producing thousands of pages in the 1990s claiming – often erroneously and misleadingly – that the framers themselves had intended this model for the office of the presidency.

George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton continued Reagan’s use of unitary executive theory relatively unchanged. George W. Bush, however, greatly expanded the concept, arguing that the president had the authority to spy on Americans without a warrant, detain suspected terrorists without charge or trial, and even torture prisoners.

From holding detainees as “enemy combatants” with no legal rights in an extraterritorial prison camp subject to trial only by military tribunal to a massive new spying program, Bush robustly asserted executive power as commander-in-chief to do what he saw as necessary to protect the American people (Perine 2006; Howell 2005, 418). In fact, John Yoo argued that no other branch had the authority to review the president’s decisions; in a speech, he said, “Congress cannot use…legislative powers to change the Constitution’s allocation of powers between the president and Congress in the war power,” (Perine 2006). This notion – which underlay some of Bush’s most aggressive expansions of power – has vast consequences…the Bush administration, fueled by trailblazing lawyers and hawkish neoconservatives (e.g., Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney), waged a multi-theater war on terror that involved the unprecedented extension of powers of the unitary executive (Warshaw 2009).

Barack Obama did not fully embrace Bush’s incredible expansion of presidential power, though some would argue that he nevertheless relied on its precedents to unilaterally authorize military action in Libya.

Then came Donald Trump, who attempted to demolish every check and balance on the executive office imaginable. He claimed the authority to fire independent agency chiefs (and followed through, in FBI Director James Comey’s case), actually fired independent inspector generals, argued the president is immune from criminal investigation and prosecution, threatened to sic the military on racial justice protesters, bypassed the congressional appropriations process to use military funds to build a wall on the southern border, and tried to illegally stay in power by overturning the 2020 election—among a slew of other unconstitutional actions, statements ("I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president”), and threats. Some of Trump’s more dangerous ideas, like ordering the Pentagon to seize voting machines, were only prevented from becoming reality through the intervention of more rational federal employees and civil servants. As we’ll see, Project 2025 ensures these barriers to autocracy will not be in place for a second Trump term.

Install loyalists

Project 2025 hinges on filling the administration with loyalists who will not oppose Trump’s burgeoning autocracy. To this end, Trump’s former personnel director, John McEntee, is working with the Heritage Foundation to create a personnel database of far-right “purists” ready to join the administration on day one.

We’re told immense, intense attention will be given to the social-media histories of anyone being considered for top jobs. Those queasy about testing the limits of Trump’s power will get flagged and rejected. The massive headhunting quest aims to recruit 20,000 people to serve in the next administration, as a down payment on 4,000 presidential appointments + potential replacements for as many as 50,000 federal workers who are “policy-adjacent,” as Trumpers put it.

In order to install tens of thousands of loyalist federal workers, Trump would first have to get rid of tens of thousands of career civil servants. According to Axios, the former president plans to reimpose his Schedule F executive order to remove federal employees’ protections and more easily purge them from government.

“I think Schedule F is basically doctrine now on the right,” said Russ Vought, an architect of Schedule F when he was Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget [who now works on Project 2025]. “So I think one that sits in that position does not have an ability to not do this, not unlike any other governing philosophy” widely embraced by conservatives.

“Schedule F is getting to the point where I cannot see anyone who runs on the Republican side who doesn’t put this into play,” Vought, the president of the Center for Renewing America, a right-wing think tank, continued.

As for presidential appointees, there is some speculation that Trump’s allies in Congress are holding open positions to make it easier for Trump to fill them in should he win the election. Nowhere is this more stark than Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s (R-AL) [hold](https://thehill.com/…

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