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.
Ben Droz
Ben Droz
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Pinnacle Bank Expo Center on the Nebraska State Fairgrounds on October 05, 2026 in Grand Island, Nebraska.
The President Invited Iran to Bomb My Home
I was driving home to San Diego from Los Angeles on Monday night when I heard that the President of the United States had offered both cities up to Iran as bomb targets. At a rally in Nebraska, defending his war, Trump told the crowd, “let [Iran] take out Los Angeles, let ‘em take out San Diego.” It was, he said, “a very small price to pay.”
I was coming from a Bernie Sanders rally for Proposition 40, the one-time tax on California billionaires that would send 90% of its revenue to healthcare. We desperately need it to pass because, in order to give tax breaks to billionaires, Trump signed a law that will strip health coverage from 10 million Americans; this tax will make sure we can still cover Californians. Call me crazy, but I think taxing billionaires one time so we can make sure kids in California get to see a doctor is a very small price to pay. I also think that even if Trump were joking, it is indefensible to make jokes about the potential destruction of so many lives. Human life is never a small price to pay. Human life is priceless.
Plus, the reality is: here in San Diego, we’re already paying the price for Trump’s actions, and it’s not small at all. He has gutted FEMA, tried to kill climate resiliency programs, and destroyed public health standards, while his signature law is set to cut off health insurance and food support for hundreds of thousands of San Diegans. Like plenty of American cities, San Diego is already busy finding local solutions to respond to the problems this president has recklessly created.
Not to mention, at least 19 American service members have been killed in this war already. Human rights monitors have documented more than 3,600 dead in Iran by April alone. Here at home, gas is sitting just pennies below its all-time record. Taxpayers have already spent more than $45 billion on the war, while Trump’s oil and gas portfolio has grown by roughly $15.5 million this year alone. Of course anything is a “small price” to someone paying free.99 for this war, and profiting from it. Meanwhile, We the People are paying twice: first for the war, and then for the consequences of that war. But now he wants San Diego to pay a third time, flippantly offering us up to Iran.
It is worth noticing which cities he thought to name. Were San Diego and Los Angeles strategically chosen to signify something to his audience, or were they simply the first cities that came to mind as expendable places? Either way, the effect is to normalize—-and to gauge a crowd’s reaction to–the idea of massive violence in major California cities, suitable targets because of their perceived liberal lean. So what if Iran needs to bomb a little bit of America before the war can be over? Who cares, says Trump, if they target Los Angeles and San Diego?
By the way, why didn’t he offer up San Francisco, the free-love hippie-town MAGA loves to hate (and also my birthplace)? Could it be because that’s where the tech titans live? The same ones who joined Trump for Xi Jinping’s state dinner, a guest list worth a combined $2.4 trillion?
San Diego may have fewer billionaires, but it is home to more than 115,000 active-duty service members and 230,000 veterans. One in six active-duty sailors–in the entire Navy–is stationed here. So is one in four Marines. You cannot throw a rock in this county without hitting a military family: brats and spouses and veterans are among us. I got out of the Navy last year after ten years, and eight of those were here in San Diego. When Trump says “let ‘em take out San Diego,” he’s talking about the backbone of the United States military. He’s also talking about the people fighting his war.
San Diego has not been watching this war from the sidelines. Today, the USS Abraham Lincoln returns to North Island after an almost yearlong deployment to the Middle East that featured food shortages, broken toilets, and mold in the showers after 286 days at sea without a single port call. Eight sailors in the Lincoln’s strike group attempted suicide, but in August, when a reporter asked whether the deployment had gone on too long, Trump said “not nearly long enough.” Now he has told a crowd in Nebraska that we should let Iran take out the city those sailors call home. These are sociopathic sentiments.
Last week at Quantico, Pete Hegseth closed his address to the force by telling them, “President Trump has your back and so do I.” To the contrary, President Trump has put one of the biggest military towns in the country forward as a target for our adversaries. With friends like these, the “domestic” in “against all enemies, foreign and domestic” starts to sound a lot less hypothetical.
San Diego is home to Naval Air Station North Island, Naval Base San Diego, Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, the Point Loma submarine base, Camp Pendleton, and Miramar (and I have been permanently stationed at or trained at all of them). If Iran bombed San Diego and Los Angeles, aside from the devastating loss of life, it would cripple an immense share of our national security readiness.
And for what, exactly? Trump says the war is “essentially almost over with.” This is the same man who claimed in June 2025 that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated,” then launched a war over it anyway on February 28. More than seven months later, he wants us to believe two things at once: that we’ve basically won, and that we might need to sacrifice an American city or two to finish winning. If the war is almost over, why does anybody need to take out San Diego?
I wonder if Trump’s endorsed candidate for California’s 48th District here in San Diego County will respond to these remarks. He recently said “no pain, no gain,” when referring to the gas prices San Diegans are paying. Jim Desmond, would you apply that same mindset if we were bombed? Or do you have the moral courage to stand up for the people you’re running to represent?
Last November, six Democratic members of Congress, all veterans, including Senator Mark Kelly, recorded a video reminding troops of their duty to disobey unlawful orders, restating the law that says so. Trump called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” and then his Justice Department went looking for an indictment, which a grand jury refused. The president treated reading the law out loud to the troops as a capital offense, but then he himself invited a foreign enemy to destroy two American cities, possibly as a punchline. Is anyone calling the latter sedition? Who is demanding accountability?
Calling our lives a small price to pay affirms a moral bankruptcy, as well as an obvious dereliction of duty to the office he holds. While we can’t impeach him or invoke the 25th Amendment ourselves, we must stop being so quiet about what we’re paying already. We can make our voices heard by calling our representatives, writing op-eds, knocking doors, phone banking, and voting in defiance of the man who threatens the safety of our city. Ballots are already arriving in mailboxes. Vote, and vote yes on 40 (and no on 41 and 42).
Trump has been harming our cities for a while, but now he is inviting our military adversaries to join him in the harm. If we have any self-respect as Americans, we must not tolerate our leaders disregarding the dignity of lives in this way. We must fight for our home.
Julie Roland was a Naval Officer for ten years, deploying to both the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf as a helicopter pilot before separating in June 2025 as a Lieutenant Commander. She has a law degree from the University of San Diego, a Master of Laws from Columbia University, and is a member of the Truman National Security Project.