James Goodwin in the Boston Review: The week after taking office in 2017, Donald Trump announced his administration’s signature policy on the administrative state—the constellation of agencies, institutions, and procedures that Congress has created to help the president implement the laws it passes—when he signed Executive Order 13771. The directive purported to create a “regulatory budget” scheme that prohibited agencies from issuing a new rule unless they first repealed two existing rules and ensured that the resulting cost savings offset any costs the new rule might impose.
The effort failed. While federal agencies reduced their regulatory output during the Trump administration, they made little lasting progress in repealing existing rules. The Administrative Procedure Act, which governs much of how the administrative state operates, makes it hard to do so. Most of the Trump administration’s repeal attempts were met with rejection by federal courts for failing to abide by basic procedural requirements.
Still, Executive Order 13771 perfectly encapsulated conservative thinking about regulatory policy at the time. The goal was to bring about the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” as former Trump advisor Steve Bannon famously put it. This view was in keeping with decades of conservative hostility for this arm of government, which the right has long tarred as an economic and constitutional disaster.
But that was then. In the years since, the conservative movement has coalesced around a very different way of thinking about the administrative state—one that sees it as a vehicle for advancing the conservative movement’s agenda, particularly on social issues, and thus embraces policy changes that would strengthen many aspects of its governing apparatus. There’s still plenty of room for deconstruction in this vision, particularly when it comes to issues like worker rights and environmental protection. Indeed, the Supreme Court’s conservatives demonstrated their continued commitment to the deconstruction project with their decision last week striking down the four-decade-old Chevron deference doctrine—a move that will make it easier for conservative federal judges to strike down rules they oppose on ideological grounds. But these goals are now presented alongside calls for things like enhanced agency enforcement capacity and strategies for evading congressional oversight—priorities that would have been unthinkable for a conservative regulatory agenda just a few years ago.
The best example of this shift is Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation–led “presidential transition” attack plan that would guide a second Trump administration should he win this November. The effort was spearheaded by Heritage president Kevin Roberts in 2022; a 920-page document called Mandate for Leadership, published in April last year, sets out a comprehensive blueprint in technocratic detail. The product of a broad coalition of ultra-right-wing think tanks and advocacy organizations, the plan has contributions from the Center for Renewing America (an organization committed to promoting Christian nationalism), Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America (a prominent group fighting reproductive rights), and FreedomWorks (the Koch-founded organization responsible for mainstreaming the Tea Party agenda, which has since dissolved but nevertheless helped lay the foundation for the conservative movement’s evolution in thinking on matters of regulatory policy). It covers nearly every policy issue you can think of, from defense budgets to bank regulation to highway construction. (For his part, Bannon has expressed general support for the initiative, but it is unclear whether he appreciates—or even cares about—the shift it represents.)
Project 2025 is candid about its ultimate goal: to reprogram the U.S. administrative state to support and sustain archconservative rule for decades to come. The distinguishing features of this regime would include a far more politicized bureaucracy, immunity against meaningful public or congressional oversight, abusive deployment of agency enforcement capabilities as a tool of political retribution, and aggressive manipulation of federal program implementation in the image of Christian nationalism, white supremacy, and economic inequality.
One of the Mandate’s prevailing themes is that the administrative state has become a major platform from which the radical left is able to smuggle its “woke” agenda into nearly every nook and cranny of our society. In light of this alleged shift, Project 2025 concludes that deconstruction is no longer the right strategy. Instead, the administrative state must be aggressively harnessed and then redirected. This is not a brand-new idea; conservatives have weaponized the administrative state to fight culture wars in the past, including putting arbitrary regulations on abortion clinics and introducing stringent eligibility requirements for food assistance programs. But these experiments have largely been episodic and disjointed. Project 2025’s novelty lies in the fact that it wants to make them, for the first time, into a comprehensive strategy.
Russell Vought, Trump’s former Director of the Office of Management Budget (OMB), succinctly describes this new strategy in a chapter he wrote for Mandate for Leadership: “The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power—including power currently held by the executive branch—to the American people.” Doing so, the Mandate argues, requires giving a second Trump administration nearly unchecked power over the machinery by which the administrative state operates: the institutions, the procedures, the resources, and the personnel.
Project 2025 is clearly designed to avoid the pitfalls that doomed Executive Order 13771. In many ways, Mandate for Leadership can be read as an instruction manual for undermining the safeguards meant to prevent governing officials from engaging in the abuses of power Project 2025 wants to encourage. Replete with methodical detail and technocratic jargon, it offers future political leadership across all the federal administrative agencies a full taxonomy of tactics they can deploy to either exploit the weak points in these safeguards or bypass them altogether.
One of the Mandate’s central tactics concerns rules around staffing. Currently, agencies hire professional career staff with specialized training and expertise. All must swear an oath to follow the Constitution in carrying out their duties—even and especially if that means disobeying the orders of someone higher up in the bureaucratic hierarchy. As such, these career staff provide perhaps the most important line of defense against an autocratic presidential regime. But through a policy called Schedule F, the Mandate seeks to sideline or even purge them. Derived from another of Trump’s executive orders, the proposal would reclassify the thousands of career government employees who play some role in policy formation outside of the competitive service—the federal personnel category that includes rigorous, merit-based requirements for hiring, firing, and promotion decisions. Stripped of these basic protections, which have been in place for over 140 years, many employees would become “at will,” fireable for any reason—or no reason at all. The intent is obvious: to encourage public servants to obey their political bosses, even when that means going against the law and their own expertise. Were it to take effect, workers who refuse to toe the line could be summarily terminated.
More here.
