Last spring and summer, The Fulcrum published a 30-part series on Project 2025. Now that Donald Trump’s second term The Fulcrum has started Part 2 of the series has commenced.
To no one’s surprise, President Trump reinstated his provocative “Schedule F” program as soon as he reentered the Oval Office. The policy that allows a president to redefine—and thus fire— executive branch personnel at will and replace them with loyalists, partisans, and patrons, was controversial when Trump first introduced it in October 2020. That was a mere two weeks before his failed reelection bid and only three months before his 2021 departure from the White House, scarcely enough runway to get the program off the ground.
It is even more controversial now that this administration has fully exploited its powers.
Renamed Schedule Policy/Career, the job classification program has always been the chief pillar of Project 2025.
The Kettering Foundation accurately predicted, “A rules change called Schedule F, would massively expand presidential power and fundamentally change the character of the federal government.” It is, in many ways, the cornerstone of the modern “unitary executive theory.” Swelling the list of “political appointees” from less than 1% of the federal workforce to something more in the 4% range translates into tens of thousands of hires—MAGA soldiers—who are fiercely loyal to this specific president and his conservative agenda. Give them credit: Paul Dans and Kevin Roberts, the principal architects of Project 2025, knew that to control bureaucratic employment is to control the polity.
We’re now seeing the plan play out. Indeed, Trump and his lieutenants are sticking close to the Project 2025 playbook.
Downsizing is not bad per se. And, of course, rooting out waste and fraud in government is something all Americans should applaud. But the wholesale elimination of agencies/departments, and the bull-in-a-china shop approach to “ dismantling the administrative state,” is just bad policy.
Guo Xu of the Haas School of Business at the University of California Berkeley has studied the impact of certain incentives and strains on civil servants, and he has concluded that the administration’s approach to managing the bureaucracy through massive cuts and continued pressure is probably counterproductive.
Xu found that just over half of all federal workers identify as Democrats, compared to about a quarter who see themselves as Republicans. It would make sense then if Trump worried about partisan resistance. Even so, Xu says, those numbers tell a logical story: “Democrats are simply more pro-government and prefer to work for the state!” he says. More importantly, though, Xu concludes that the slash-and-burn mentality of this administration actually hurts the cause of pushing forward a MAGA platform. He writes, “Rather than driving out civil servants,” he insists, “DOGE would benefit from finding ways to make public service more attractive for Republicans. I doubt that demonizing civil servants is conducive to this.”
Republicans and Democrats overwhelmingly want a merit-based, non-partisan civil service. The numbers are striking in this deeply polarized moment. 88% of Democrats and 87% of Republicans believe that having a non-partisan civil service is important for a strong American democracy. In terms of competence, the astonishing numbers are even higher: 94% of Democrats and 91% of Republicans.
The problem is that Trump’s “Schedule Policy/Career Executive Order” flouts that vast consensus. It patently scorns one of the few points of agreement among Republicans and Democrats. To be sure, it is neither meritorious nor non-partisan to put sycophants into bureaucratic positions.
So many experts on both the right and the left have repeated a similar warning. Consider just one: “Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, estimated that Schedule F would cover not 50,000 federal employees, but 500,000 nationwide. He predicted that a new Trump administration would take an expansive view of Schedule F, which would cover federal positions loosely seen as having a say in policy. “These people could be replaced at any time,” Kelley said. “Your performance would be based on your loyalty to the president and not on your skills and ability to get the job done for the American people.”
Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, frequently contends that Project 2025 is a “corrective” to the “takeover of the federal government by the unelected bureaucrats on the radical left.” His Project 2025 blueprint for conservative governance, he tells us, is an “attempt to restore proper constitutional order to this country.”
I would have thought that “restoring proper constitutional order” required a federal workforce that knew what it was doing, knew how to navigate the labyrinthian complexity of the country’s administrative state, and, most of all, pledged to serve the Constitution and the American people.
Not sure we’re getting that right now.
Samples of Phase 2 articles about Project 2025
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.