Barker is a program officer at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation and the lead editor of the foundation’s blog series “From Many, We.”
This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.
One small change to the rules classifying federal employees could significantly advance the U.S. toward authoritarianism. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s plan to staff the government with far-right movement activists, hinges on an executive order that could be implemented with surprising ease.
While much attention has been paid to the initiative’s extremist policy agenda, a rules change called Schedule F would massively expand presidential power and fundamentally change the character of the federal government. Understanding the Schedule F threat is critical to stopping it.
What is Schedule F?
Schedule F is an executive order that former President Donald Trump issued in October 2020 to remove the employment protections that prevent career government employees from being replaced for partisan reasons. It was rescinded by President Joe Biden as soon as he took office in January 2021. If Schedule F were to be reinstated, the president would be virtually free to fire dedicated civil servants and replace them with loyalists and ideologues.
Although the Project 2025 website does not specifically refer to Schedule F, this obscure rule change is essentially synonymous with the Heritage Foundation’s initiative to install as many as 50,000 conservative movement activists in the government. The reinstatement of Schedule F on “day one” is also the first step of Trump’s campaign platform, Agenda47, under which he plans to “dismantle the deep state. ”
How does Schedule F threaten democracy?
By politicizing the civil service, Schedule F could have numerous, far-reaching implications for American democracy.
- Abuse of power. Under Schedule F, presidents would be free to reward cronies and even family members with jobs or use law enforcement agencies to punish enemies and shut down protests, creating endless opportunities for corruption. Independent agencies that currently provide oversight and accountability, such as the Department of Justice, would be rendered useless.
- Expansion of executive power. Schedule F, which was itself issued by executive order rather than legislation, would enable the president to effectively make policy without Congress. By invoking Schedule F, a president could also refuse to enforce existing legislation. The plan to expand executive power is informed by the “unitary executive theory,” which essentially removes any limits to presidential authority and is championed by conservative legal scholars.
- A chilling effect. In a climate where any expression contrary to the president’s ideology could result in termination, government employees would be strongly discouraged from speaking out. Agencies obligated to tell the truth to the American people could be incentivized to suppress the truth and spread misinformation.
- Trust in government. Trust in government is already historically low. By further politicizing the government and creating chaos within it, Schedule F could contribute to further polarization and mistrust, both of which could lead to further democratic backsliding.
According to scholar Don Moynihan, “ Schedule F would be the most profound change to the civil service system since its creation in 1883.” Schedule F demands urgent attention from every pro-democracy citizen and organization. Now is the time to raise awareness of this critical threat to American democracy.
Schedule F Resources
- Protect Democracy distinguishes Schedule F from legitimate reform efforts.
- Leading policy scholars and former government executives have signed the Working Group to Protect and Reform the US Civil Service Statement voicing their concerns.
- Schedule F would have a significant impact on government performance and accountability, according to Moynihan.
- Finally, Moynihan’s short paper provides a more detailed overview of Schedule F and its intellectual underpinnings.
This article was initially published by the Charles F. Kettering Foundation.
More in The Fulcrum about Project 2025
- A cross-partisan approach
- An Introduction
- Rumors of Project 2025’s Demise are Greatly Exaggerated
- Department of Education
- Managing the bureaucracy
- Department of Defense
- Department of Energy
- The Environmental Protection Agency
- Education Savings Accounts
- Department of Veterans Affairs
- The Department of Homeland Security
- U.S. Agency for International Development
- Affirmative action
- A federal Parents' Bill of Rights
- Department of Labor
- Intelligence community
- Department of State
- Department of the Interior
- Federal Communications Commission
- A perspective from Europe
- Department of Health and Human Services
- Voting Rights Act
- Another look at the Federal Communications Commission
- A Christo-fascist manifesto designing a theocracy
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.