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 golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.