Project 2025: The Administrative State and Immigration
For the next part of the executive summary, a little background is needed. It has to do with the types of employees the government has. There are two types. The political appointees think a cabinet secretary is the most obvious, and what is called scheduled F, technical career civil service employees.
Who are your Schedule F employees? Well, a nurse at the VA, a Dietitian working as a civilian employee at a military hospital. Your local national weather service weather person is a researcher at the National Institutes of Health — a nuclear researcher at the Department of Energy. Yes, we have those. An engineer at NASA. What all these jobs have in common is that their mission is not political. However, the far right and President Trump hate these people, and they want to destroy the modern civil service and at least partially replace it with political appointees.
In other words, they want a patronage system in which your job depends on your political loyalties. We used to have this system. Just ask the mid-19th-century Democratic political machine in New York City. The Postmaster General (granted, it was a cabinet-level post) was appointed as a political favor. I am giving you the relevant pages from the introduction. I highlighted in red where this is spelled out in plain language.
How do you fire unfurable employees? Well, you use a little paperwork and sleight of administrative magic and convert them into at-will political employees. John Oliver’s team is well beyond where I am well beyond where I am in reading that text. So, in this extremely good summary, he details the objective of the Office of Management and Budget, OMB. It’s one of the most minor well-known offices in the US, yet they are critical for analyzing how any bill will affect things like the deficit. During the Trump administration, they sounded the alarm as to what his tax cuts would do.
I am sourcing this from Brookings. And this was from. 2017. But if you wonder why they want to end independence at OMB, there you have it. It’s not just OMB. They want to get rid of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Why? They and their weather satellites produce all the data that climate scientists use for climate science.
They are also into the hurricane modeling business, but it’s fiction, so let’s drill as far as the eye can see. We are energy-independent right now while transitioning, but that is a threat to the oil industry.
Alliances…
Now, let’s deal with the next section of the executive summary. After I finish this, I will highlight specific sections of chapters. This section concerns a deep strain of isolationist thinking.
Part of the current GOP ideology is coming straight from the John Birch Society. Remember black helicopters and UN troops? Trust me, it gets very real when covering a debate in the backcountry, and somebody asks about black helicopters, and they are serious.
It’s one of those moments when you must take notes and remain neutral. My point is that this is no longer your crazy uncle. It’s the whole Republican party and the whole conservative movement apparatus.
So this is the part on alliances and why we need to retrench and leave the world stage. Some of this starts in the last section I posted above.
To me, the most alarming part of this is the conspiracy theory that elites don’t trust the American people. This is why we are joining Supra national institutions. This thinking is old. It precedes the John Birch Society. It goes back to America, at least to the First of the 1930s.
The whole idea that this is a neo-Wilsonian plot to destroy American independence is precisely from that era. It’s one reason the United States did not join the League of Nations. However, it is the reason we got behind the United Nations.
We need a conversation on the UN, but that’s another discussion. These people are also telling you they will pull out of climate agreements. See what I said about NOAA? It’s connected and will affect our kids in ways we cannot start to guess at.
Then there are the usual bogeymen about open borders and all that. We know what Trump intends to do because he has told us. Whether this plan is aspirational or possible is beside the point. It’s a mistake not to believe authoritarians. He intends to deport 11 million people, a low number. That is not a joke, and it’s not a game,
At this point, they are openly talking about ethnic cleansing in the United States. It is getting that bad. If your hair is not on fire already, it should be.
However, why is Trump distancing himself from this? As we all start to read and cover it — and I am sugar, not sugar quoting this, I am giving you screencaps — this popularity is crashing. Most Americans see danger when they are educated on it. But once we get into the meat of this, and I once again ask you to read it, we will have to use just smaller sections of this.
