Here, we wrap up our dive into Pillar 2 of Project 2025, highlighting its goals and objectives and showing where it provides extensive proposals for how the next Republican President can dismantle and reshape the administrative state. If you happen to think Head Start is a good thing, that consumer protections are good, or that having requirements for quality food options in school lunches is good, understanding these proposals would be beneficial.

I saved the biggest part of Pillar #2 for now because of all the things Project 2025 proposes in its 900 pages; if I had to pick one to be the most important and consequential, this one would actually be it.

Part 8 of the Project 2025 deep dive focuses on Schedule ‘F,’ which Trump instituted via Executive Order. Schedule F reclassified federal employees into a new category, stripping them of long-held employment protections. President Biden rescinded it immediately.

A BIG POLICY SHIFT: Reclassifying Federal Employees Through Schedule F 

When I first heard about Project 2025 three years ago, someone was talking about something called “Schedule F.” 

Schedule ‘F’ refers to President Trump’s executive order, #1395724, in October 2020. This order aimed to reclassify many federal employees involved in policymaking into a new employment category called, wait for it….”Schedule F.” President Biden repealed the executive order immediately after taking office in January 2021. Project 2025 would call for its immediate restoration by a new Republican president.

When we say “federal employees” here, we’re talking about federal civil servants, typically employees of the federal government who work within one of its many agencies.  They could be a policy analyst at the EPA or a linguistic analyst at the National Security Agency (NSA). OR food safety inspectors at the FDA. Some are economists working at the Department of Labor. Others are scientists doing research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – which happens to be the single biggest biomedical research agency in the entire world. 

For more than a century, civil service laws have protected these roles, meaning they cannot be fired without just cause and due process. This ensures their work is based on expertise rather than political influence.

How Schedule F Changes Federal Employment

This new employment category would strip federal employees of job protections, making them easier to hire and fire at will, resulting in the president having more direct control over the federal bureaucracy they comprise. The rationale behind the order was that it would ensure that the executive branch could implement the president’s agenda without opposition from career civil servants, who are often seen as having established procedures that resist change.

Before Schedule F, federal civil servants were protected by the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), which ensured they could only be fired for cause, such as poor performance or misconduct. Any action had to follow a structured process that included the right to appeal. This system was designed to protect federal employees from political interference, ensuring that employment decisions were based on merit rather than loyalty to the current administration.

Making Schedule F a reality again would reclassify all these federal employees in policy-making roles, stripping them of these protections. This reclassification would allow the president to hire and fire these employees without demonstrating cause or following the typical due process. 

This change would weaken civil servants’ independence and could lead to a situation in which scientific and policy decisions are influenced more by political considerations than expertise or evidence.

An Example: Dr. Anthony Fauci

Everyone either loves or hates Dr. Anthony Fauci. During COVID, he was the head of the National Institutes for Health (NIH), meaning he was a federal civil servant and enjoyed protections that made it difficult for him to be fired without cause. Though enjoyed isn’t quite the right word, as it makes it sound like Dr. Fauci happened to have something he wasn’t entitled to. The better way to put it is that, as a federal civil servant, his employment had certain protections to ensure he couldn’t be arbitrarily fired without cause. He and every other federal civil servant. 

Many people who disagreed with the public health handling of the COVID crisis demanded that President Trump fire Dr. Fauci. What those people didn’t realize was that President Trump couldn’t have fired him because these civil service rules safeguarded his position. There would have had to be a process that included giving valid reasons for his dismissal and his right to appeal any and all of that. 

If Schedule F were implemented again as Project 2025 proposes, it would be possible to reclassify a position such as Dr. Fauci’s, making it easier to dismiss him without needing to go through the usual legal and procedural safeguards. If you’re one of the folks who thinks Dr. Fauci “should go to jail for what he did,” you’re probably saying, “I can just stop right here because if that’s what Schedule F does and they could get rid of someone like Fauci, I’m all for it.”  I would just say hold that thought until a little later because the consequences of Schedule F may not be exactly what you want.

Going Back To The 19th Century

Those who know political history in the United States will recognize that this “appointments” concept is reminiscent of the spoils system from the 19th century, where incoming presidents would reward political supporters with government jobs. This seems foreign to us, but it was the norm in the 19th century. Andrew Jackson is perhaps the most famous figure for implementing the spoils system on a large scale. Upon taking office, he replaced numerous federal officials with his supporters, justifying it by saying it would democratize government and reward political loyalty. The Grant Administration (1969-1877) saw a bunch of scandals due to the spoils system, as he appointed friends and political allies to key positions, many of whom were later involved in corruption. It is said that President Garfield was assassinated by a disgruntled campaign worker who expected to be given a job in the administration and was fatally disappointed when he wasn’t. 

The historical autopsy of this 19th-century practice is that the spoils system often led to corruption and inefficiency, eventually prompting civil service reform in the form of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883. It replaced political spoils appointments with merit-based hiring for federal employees, and that’s what we’ve had for 140+ years since.

Project 2025 proposes to take us back to the 19th century through Schedule F, which would create a system in which political loyalty could outweigh merit in federal hiring.

The Schedule F Goal: Reshape the Federal Workforce With People To Do Your Will

Once reinstated by a new Republican president, Schedule F would allow the president to quickly remove and replace tens of thousands of federal employees almost from day one. 

Three years ago, the person I was listening to said there were already lists of thousands of potential replacements who had already been vetted. This positions them to take over these roles as soon as others are fired, allowing a new administration to rapidly implement its agenda without bureaucratic resistance.

Schedule F would most affect the federal agencies where policy-making and regulatory oversight are central functions. This means the EPA, the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services, the NIH, the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Labor, not to mention the FBI and the CIA. With a new Republican administration, tens of thousands of experienced personnel in these agencies and others will be forced out almost immediately to be replaced by people whose primary positive attribute is their allegiance to the new president.

What Could Be the Consequences?

It’s important that the potential consequences of this mass change are not missed. 

On a broader view, this reclassification of federal employees could significantly diminish the independence of federal agencies if agency heads and key staff at all those places were replaced with individuals more closely aligned with the president’s political goals. Their political allegiance will always color their decision-making as they weigh whether what they do or decide will help or hurt them in keeping their jobs. Does the research data an NIH scientist uncovered contradict what the president insists is true? Will it please the presidential administration that appointed them? After all, they can be eliminated just as easily as they were hired. Many thousands of federal employees are going to ask these questions every day.

We’d also face perhaps the largest loss of institutional knowledge in our country’s history. There’s no telling how many hundreds of thousands of collective years of experience and subject matter expertise would be lost during this mass employment migration. Make no mistake, that really does matter. It’s not hard to anticipate how badly that will affect critical institutions in our country when they have to start from scratch in this way.

Those two things are good reasons enough to be very, very afraid that this will have real ill effects on our country that will ripple virtually everywhere the government touches.  But there’s another something important to consider alongside that.

A Thought Experiment About January 6th And The Aftermath Of A “Stolen Election”

Schedule F forbodes a third big potential consequence, and it’s worth concluding our discussion on the plans to dismantle the administrative state by fully understanding the ramifications of Schedule F in this other area. 

Let’s go back four years to the events leading up to January 6th and immediately after. We know that President Trump ordered numerous personnel across several key agencies to do things that played into his continued insistence that the election had been stolen from him.

President Trump tried to pressure key Department of Justice officials to declare the 2020 election corrupt. They refused.

We know he urged Vice President Mike Pence to reject counting the Electoral College results or delay their certification. Pence did not.

During the final weeks of his presidency, President Trump reportedly discussed invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807, which would have allowed him to deploy military forces domestically to maintain or restore order. President Trump discussed using the military to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election by seizing voting machines, deploying troops to “re-run” the election in some states, or suppressing potential unrest (however he defined it). However, that didn’t happen because key military and civilian leaders, including then-Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, strongly opposed these ideas and pushed back on President Trump’s demands. So it didn’t materialize.

The common thread in these “crises that didn’t happen” is that good, experienced people across all agencies stood up and said, “No, Mr. President, we’re not going to do that because what you’re ordering us to do is wrong.”

That is literally the ONLY reason we did not have the greatest constitutional crisis since the Civil War. Good people who knew the law and what was right and wrong stood up to a president who ordered them to do what they knew was wrong and refused to do so. 

DOJ officials threatened the largest mass resignation in history rather than give support to a public charade of election fraud that they knew had no truth. 

Military officials like Gen. Milley refused to give in to Trump’s basest demands for them to go into states and use military force to confiscate voting machines “just to be sure there’s no fraud.” 

Senior FBI leaders refused to implement orders that would have given the false impression that the country’s top investigative arm validated a lie about the election that had no basis in truth.

Good people stood up and said no and the country survived.

Imagine The Consequences

Now, think about the reality of Schedule F and what it means. If Schedule F had already been in effect, those who stood up wouldn’t even have been in those positions because there would already have been thousands of sympathetic individuals in place to carry out all of those things President Trump demanded. The Trump campaign has been interviewing potential administration employees over the past year.

Imagine where our country would be if those political hires had been in place in January 2021. Imagine where our country would be if the military leadership was comprised of MAGA-sympathetic generals and officers who said, “Yes, Mr. President, we will send in troops to Georgia tomorrow. And if you order us to shoot protestors as you wanted General Milley to do in DC before you held that Bible up in the front of the church, just say the word. Gen. Milley isn’t in charge, you are.” 

Imagine where our country would be if JD Vance had been Vice President instead of Mike Pence. Or becomes Vice President.

This is why everyone should take seriously Project 2025’s Schedule F proposal, which President Trump enacted via Executive Order.

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Image: Pamela Reynoso

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