The Scary Trump Superpower Hiding in Plain Sight
Forget Project 2025, all they need is Schedule F to wreck the government and remake America.
IMAGINE A U.S. GOVERNMENT led and staffed by tens of thousands of JD Vances, Aileen Cannons, and Mike Johnsons. An entire federal bureaucracy of acolytes who are loyal above all to Donald Trump—above even laws, courts, security, liberty, the “general welfare,” and the rest of the Constitution.
This is Donald Trump’s plan for America, if voters return him to the White House. And it’s no secret.
Trump and Republicans have issued three main statements laying out what they intend to do if they retake the executive branch in January 2025: (1) the party platform, approved at the GOP convention last month, written reportedly with Trump’s intense involvement; (2) the Trump campaign’s own “Agenda47”; and (3) the controversial “Project 2025,” a 900-plus-page right-wing policy manual created by 11 conservative organizations and scores of people who once worked for Trump.
The former president is now trying vainly to disown Project 2025 and its raft of unpopular policy prescriptions. But he’s publicly and frequently embracing the one proposal, detailed in both Project 2025 and Agenda47, that could make all the difference: a broad assault on the 141-year-old merit-based civil-service system that covers over 2 million civilian federal employees across the country.
Trump attempted a relatively modest civil-service tear-down at the end of his first term with an executive order he called Schedule F. Joe Biden won, revoked the order, and made it tougher to reinstate. Both Agenda47 and Project 2025 call for its return in a new Trump administration, and the barebones GOP platform makes clear who would be targeted: “woke” civilian employees in the federal workforce and “woke Leftwing Democrats” in the military.
Presidents normally fill about 4,000 slots with political friends and allies. But in March 2022, looking to his next campaign, Trump vowed to make “every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States.” Vance, the future Ohio senator and VP pick, was months ahead of him. “I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” he told a podcaster in late 2021. “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
In short, Trump and Vance are planning a government-wide, personnel-driven “war on woke.”
Researchers for Project Sovereignty 2025 are compiling what’s essentially a blacklist—determining from social media and other sources who’d be first out the door in a second Trump term. Project 2025 itself has reportedly built up a database of 10,000 to 20,000 vetted-for-Trumpiness true believers lined up as potential replacements.
“We want people who’ve been canceled, who’ve figuratively given blood for the movement,” Paul Dans told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation last month, a few weeks before he stepped down as Project 2025 director. “These are mums who’ve challenged school boards. These are people who’ve stood up in their companies and said, ‘Enough with DEI and the woke agenda.’”
These are also people with some highly unpopular ideas, including the plan to implode the civil service system. New polling on several Project 2025 priorities found opposition to Schedule F second only to restricting contraception access for women (72 percent opposed vs. 68 percent). Third-least popular, at 64 percent, was eliminating the U.S. Department of Education.
The National Treasury Employee Union warned this year that Trump’s re-election could bring a massive purge—a warning inspired by documents the union obtained that show the Trump administration sought in late 2020 to make 68 percent of employees at the White House budget office fireable at will. “Office managers, human resource specialists, administrative assistants, cybersecurity specialists and other positions” were part of the housecleaning plan, along with professionals and specialists potentially having some influence on policy.
The point of a civil-service system is to insulate government hiring, promotion, and dismissal decisions from the political whims, debts, and biases of public officials. And if Trump managed to ditch those principles? Robert Shea, a veteran of the George W. Bush-era White House budget office, summed up the likely result in just four words. “An army of suckups,” he told CNN in April.
National security and public health at risk
THE SUCKUPS FROM TERM ONE are already hard at work proving Shea’s point. There are so many risks it’s hard to know where to start, but national security is arguably Job One. So let’s look at the kinds of people we know Trump likes—people who like him, who are ambitious, and who will do as much as they can to help him, whether they’re judges, members of Congress or members of his next administration.
Take Aileen Cannon, a Trump nominee confirmed as a district judge during his lame duck period after he lost the 2020 election. Brushing aside several authoritative precedents, last month Judge Cannon declared special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment unconstitutional and dismissed the well-grounded federal case alleging that Trump illegally retained classified national defense documents at his home, and repeatedly thwarted government attempts to retrieve them. Smith will appeal, but Americans will vote this fall without a verdict on whether Trump can be trusted with national security. If he wins, there may never be a trial.
Or consider Mike Johnson. The Louisiana congressman was a key player when Trump was trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Johnson spread false conspiracy theories that voting tech companies Dominion and Smartmatic used software from “Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela” that switched millions of Trump votes to Biden. Johnson called Georgia’s results “rigged” after three GOP-supervised recounts showed they were not. And he recruited 125 House colleagues to sign a legal brief backing a Texas lawsuit to invalidate results from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Since rising to House speaker, Johnson has helped Trump by delaying aid to Ukraine for months, killing a tough bipartisan border security bill so Trump could campaign on the issue, and agreeing to put two inappropriate Trump allies on the House Intelligence Committee—without consulting the committee’s Republican chairman.
The Defense Department inspector general found in 2021 that Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tx.), the onetime White House doctor to Barack Obama and Trump, drank alcohol to excess, misused Ambien, and abused subordinates when he held that job. The Navy demoted him when the report came out. Another inspector general report published earlier this year found that Jackson’s office was handing out pills like candy. And now Congress is investigating him for buying a private club membership with campaign funds.
Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pennsylvania, like Johnson a major figure in the machinations to overturn the 2020 election, helped Trump try to elevate allies at the Justice Department after the election and promoted a vote fraud conspiracy theory involving an Italian contractor, the CIA, and military satellites. The FBI seized his phone as part of its ongoing investigation into the January 6th Capitol riot and efforts to overturn the election.
JD Vance demonstrated his fealty to Trump when he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in February that the 2020 election had “a lot of problems” and he would be no Mike Pence. If he had been vice president on January 6th, Vance said, he would have let Congress fight over who was the winner instead of accepting the state-certified tallies. So: Ignore the Constitution, the official state results, and the myriad investigations and rulings that concluded the “lots of problems” claim was baseless.
Schedule F would be Trump the sequel on steroids
A SECOND TRUMP TERM would almost certainly be hazardous to health and safety. Not only did Trump pick radiologist Scott Atlas—“an MRI guy,” as one worried doctor put it—as his White House COVID adviser six months into a terrifying pandemic, the president himself mused publicly about sunlight, disinfectant, and Ivermectin as COVID treatments. Trump also nixed a federal response in favor of offloading responsibility and blame to governors. He turned against the successful COVID vaccines his administration sped to market, arguably his administration’s greatest accomplishment, and now he’s courting more danger by vowing to cut off federal funds to any school district that has a vaccine mandate.
That would be all districts and possibly all vaccines (he doesn’t specify), plus it wouldn’t be legal to withhold money appropriated by Congress. Empty threat? Maybe. On the other hand, infamous anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talked to Trump last month about a possible job running the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services if he dropped his independent presidential bid and endorsed Trump.
“Personnel is policy. Those who truly want Washington to change must look beyond the rhetoric to the Rolodex.” Scot Faulkner, personnel director for the 1980 Reagan–Bush campaign and a transition planner for that administration, wrote those words eight years ago in the Washington Examiner.
He was right. Trump’s Rolodex is the Project 2025 list of thousands who have “figuratively given blood” for him and his MAGA movement. His plans for himself and America are beyond alarming. We know that because many of his allies and appointees are already inescapably, maddeningly present in our politics and our justice system. We know it because we’re living the preview right now.
 | A guest post by
|