Project Overview
This essay is part of a series by Lawyers Defending American Democracy, explaining in practical terms what the administration’s executive orders and other executive actions mean for all of us. Each of these actions springs from the pages of Project 2025, the administration's 900-page playbook that serves as the foundation for these measures. The Project 2025 agenda should concern all of us, as it tracks strategies adopted by countries such as Hungary, which have eroded democratic norms and have adopted authoritarian approaches to governing.
Project 2025’s stated intent to move quickly to “dismantle” the federal government will strip the public of important protections against excessive presidential power and provide enormous and unchecked opportunities for big corporations to profit by preying on America's households.
In Part One of the series, we address attacks on the federal workforce, specifically, through the removal of protection for tens of thousands of federal workers under Executive Order 14171 and through large-scale reductions in force directed under Executive Order 14201.
From Public Service to Presidential Loyalty
Beginning on Inauguration Day, President Trump has moved swiftly and steadily to dismantle the federal government. If successfully implemented, his stream of executive orders and related actions will result in the destruction of government as we know it, replacing it with a new operational system where conflicts of interest abound, checks and balances are gone, and government workers are chosen based on loyalty to the President instead of the duty to serve the public. Fact-based decisions made by professionals will become a thing of the past.
Project 2025 – The Destruction of Government Agencies
Executive Orders 14171 and 14201 come straight from the Project 2025 chapter entitled, Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy. The intent of this chapter is to essentially replace the federal workforce with a decentralized and privatized system.
Executive Order 14171 achieves the goals of Project 2025 by removing due process and other employment for thousands of federal workers by reclassifying as many as 50,000 members of the civil service as “Schedule F” employees. This enables the administration to fire these employees without due process and to replace them with political appointees. Media reports describe a process where hiring focuses more on loyalty to the President than on merit.
Executive Order 14201 complements that directive through mandated, large-scale, and widespread reductions in the federal workforce, without any requirement that such firings be based on performance, productivity, or merit.
Why This Matters
These Executive Orders empower the administration to fill positions that were once occupied by nonpolitical employees with unqualified loyalists. Although some high-level government workers are typically replaced following a change in federal administration, the vast majority are not. This stability enables the government to perform vital services without interruption, by people with expertise in health, safety, law enforcement, national security, and other crucial areas.
Civil service protections were created more than a century ago in response to the corruption of the “spoils system” in which government jobs were rewarded for political loyalty. They were designed to protect government workers from political interference, allowing them to serve the public while shielded from political pressure.
The executive orders ignore this history and will have direct impacts on the public by reducing the quality of government services and jeopardizing public health and safety. The examples are many and include:
- Public safety is threatened when experienced federal workers are summarily fired and replaced with political appointees who may lack expertise in such vital areas as fighting infectious and chronic diseases; investigating deadly accidents; responding to natural disasters; ensuring airline safety; protecting our air and water and the safety of food and medicine; and safeguarding nuclear weapons.
- Eviscerating the workforce at such agencies as the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Social Security Administration will gut services supporting those who served in the military and older Americans who rely on Social Security.
- The administration’s widespread indiscriminate firings, without regard to merit or function, even go beyond Project 2025’s directives, obliterating the traditional approach to terminating employees based on performance reviews, eliminating duplication, and implementing small strategic changes based on program effectiveness.
The executive orders will result in cuts to essential government services and increased costs for taxpayers.
- When needed functions are cut, the government may fill the vacuum with private contracts, often at a higher cost. This opens the door to private profiteering at taxpayer expense.
- When politics, not expertise, governs hiring and firing, new employees constantly need training due to increased turnover, raising costs.
The executive orders will open the door to patronage systems and corruption and will eliminate vital expertise.
- Politically motivated firings eliminate knowledgeable, skilled employees and reduce critical services.
- As we learned from the implementation of authoritarian playbooks in countries such as Hungary, dismantling the civil service leads to corruption and fraud as well as the loss of needed expertise.
They also threaten the independence and integrity of agency officials.
- These executive orders will enable the President, cabinet secretaries, and other high-level presidential appointees to fire large swaths of the federal bureaucracy at will. They will reward campaign donors and supporters with government jobs while punishing those who supported an opposing candidate but are otherwise qualified to serve.
- Federal employees whose boss is a public official run the risk of feeling pressured to benefit that official instead of the public.
Key Takeaway
This creation of a practice of governance that rewards supporters, friends, and loyalists and that reduces the size of federal agencies without regard to the services they provide will reduce needed services and threaten our health and safety. It should raise alarms for all those who believe that federal employees must be free to provide crucial services without political interference.
Lawyers Defending American Democracy is dedicated to galvanizing lawyers “to defend the rule of law in the face of an unprecedented threat to American Democracy.” Its work is not political or partisan.
A view of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 25, 2026. President Donald Trump jolted Republicans during a fiery appearance at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, scrapping a housing bill signing ceremony and clashing behind closed doors with a party rebel who challenged him over the Iran war. Trump had been expected to sign the bipartisan housing.
Only Trump doesn’t care about housing
It was August 15, 2024. Then candidate Donald Trump stepped out of his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club’s columned clubhouse to a gaggle of reporters. He was flanked by tables of groceries and signs showing the rising cost of food. Also on one of the tables was a dollhouse, meant to represent the equally alarming rise in housing prices.
It was a speech about the economy, the single most important issue of the 2024 election cycle, full of promises that went right to the heart of Americans’ anxieties. While former President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris were contorting themselves to posture a good economy that just needed more time to recover from the pandemic, Trump was preying on voters’ very real fears of unaffordable gas, groceries, and homes. It was obviously a winning message.
In that speech, Trump promised, “We’re going to open up tracts of federal land for housing construction. We desperately need housing for people who can’t afford what’s going on now.”
As of mid-2023, there had been a housing shortage of nearly four million homes, according to the National Association of Realtors. Americans all over the country were either priced out of buying new homes due to low inventory, trapped in their existing homes by sky-high mortgage rates, or facing exorbitant rent hikes thanks to corporate investors buying up rental properties. Americans needed help, and Trump promised it.
Cut to March of 2026, when Trump reportedly told House Speaker Mike Johnson, “No one gives a sh*t about housing.”
That kind of thinking may explain why Trump this week suddenly announced he was canceling a signing ceremony for the bipartisan “21st Century ROAD to Housing Act,” a housing bill co-sponsored by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott that passed the House 358-32 and was approved in the Senate on Monday.
Trump instead demanded Congress pass the SAVE America Act, his controversial election grievance bill that doesn’t have enough Republican support to get passed in the Senate.
It’s just the latest in a line of policy self-owns where Trump has seemingly intentionally made life more difficult for Republicans hoping to keep their majority. Despite midterm elections occurring in the midst of a blistering economy and an unpopular war, they were surely hoping the housing bill would give them something — anything — to brag about when they returned home to their districts.
And very much to the contrary, Americans do give a sh*t about housing. According to a recent survey by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a whopping 79% say the cost of housing is extremely or very important to them. Eighty-three percent say Congress should take action on the issue — like it just did. Eighty-nine percent say the House and Senate need to work together to pass affordable housing legislation — like they just did. And 63% say they would be more likely to vote for a lawmaker if they helped pass legislation to build more affordable homes and lower housing costs — like they just did.
There aren’t many issues that unite Americans like housing does, and very few bipartisan policy wins Congress can point to, and yet, Trump is holding that bill hostage in order to get his pet project — which doesn’t even have the support of his own party — pushed through.
If you’re trying to make sense of something so nonsensical, as I’m sure many Republican lawmakers are, it’s certainly sad but not actually all that complicated. Trump said what he needed to get reelected and then promptly abandoned his promises in order to pursue his own self-interests, even if those interests are bad for Republicans and bad for voters.
That’s just the kind of guy he is.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.