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
U.S. President Donald Trump delivers the State of the Union address during a joint session of Congress in the House Chamber at the Capitol on Feb. 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump delivered his address days after the Supreme Court struck down the administration's tariff strategy, and amid a U.S. military buildup in the Persian Gulf threatening Iran.
Some MAGA loyalists have turned on Trump. Why the rest haven’t
I recently watched "A Face in the Crowd" for the umpteenth time.
I had a better reason than procrastination to rewatch Elia Kazan’s brilliant 1957 film exploring populism in the television age. It was homework. I was asked to discuss it with Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz at the just-concluded TCM Film Festival in Los Angeles. As a pundit and an author, I do a lot of public speaking. But I don’t really do a lot of cool public speaking, so this was a treat.
With that not-very-humble brag out of the way, I had a depressing realization watching it this time.
"A Face in the Crowd" tells the story of a charming drifter with a dark side named Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, played brilliantly by Andy Griffith. A singer with the gift of the gab, Rhodes takes off on radio but quickly segues to the brand-new medium of television. He becomes a national sensation — and political kingmaker — by forming a deep connection with the masses, particularly among the rural and working classes. His core audience is made up of people with grievances. “Everybody that’s got to jump when somebody else blows the whistle,” as Rhodes puts it.
The film’s climax (spoiler alert) comes when Rhodes’ manager and spurned lover, Marcia, turns on the microphone while the credits rolled at the end of “Cracker Barrel,” his national TV show. Rhodes tells his entourage what he really thinks of the “morons” in his audience. “Shucks, I can take chicken fertilizer and sell it to them for caviar. I can make them eat dog food, and they’ll think it’s steak. … Good night, you stupid idiots.”
It was a canonical “hot mic” moment in American cinema. But the idea that if people could glimpse the “real person” behind the popular facade, they’d turn on them is a very old theme in literature — think Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" (1782) or Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s "The School for Scandal" (1777), in which diaries and letters do the work of microphones.
Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg were very worried about the ability of demagogues to whip up populist fervor and manipulate the masses through the power of TV, in part because everyone had already seen it happen with radio and film, by Father Coughlin in America and Hitler in Germany. But as dark as their vision was, they still clung to the idea that if the demagogue was exposed, the people would instantly turn on their leader in an “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment for the mass media age.
And that’s the source of my depressing realization. I think they were wrong. It turns out that once that organic connection is made, even a shocking revelation of the truth won’t necessarily break the spell.
In 2016, a lot of writers revisited "A Face in the Crowd" to understand the Trump phenomenon. After all, here was a guy who used a TV show — "The Apprentice" — and social media to build a massive following, going over the heads of the “establishment.” Trump’s own hot mic moment with "Access Hollywood," in which he boasted of his sexual predations, proved insufficient to undo him. That was hardly the only such moment for him. We’ve heard Trump bully the Georgia secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes.” He told Bob Woodward he deliberately “played down” COVID-19. After leaving office, he was recorded telling aides he shouldn’t be sharing classified documents with them — then doing it anyway. And so on.
Trump’s famous claim that he could “shoot somebody” on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters may have been hyperbole. But it’s not crazy to think he wouldn’t lose as many voters as he should.
In the film, Lonesome Rhodes implodes when Americans encounter his off-air persona. The key to Trump’s success is that he ran as his off-air persona. Why people love that persona is a complicated question. Among the many complementary explanations is that he comes across as authentic, and some people value authenticity more than they value good character, honesty, or competence.
This is not just a problem for Republicans. Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner once had a Nazi tattoo and has said things about women as distasteful as Trump’s “grab them by (the genitals)” comments, and the Democratic establishment is rallying around him because he’s authentic — and because Democrats want to win that race.
Many prominent MAGA loyalists are turning on Trump these days. They claim — wrongly in my opinion — that he’s changed and that the Iran war is a betrayal of their cause. But if you look at the polls, voters who describe themselves as “MAGA” still overwhelmingly support Trump. In short, he still has the Fifth Avenue voters on his side.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.