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
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.