With more than a year to go before the 2024 election, a constellation of conservative organizations is preparing for a possible second term in the White House for Donald Trump, recruiting thousands of Americans to come to Washington on a mission to federal government and replace it with a vision closer to his own.

Led by the long-standing Heritage Foundation think tank and fueled by former Trump administration officials, the far-reaching effort is essentially an administration waiting for the return of the former president or a candidate who aligns with their ideals and can beat President Biden. 2024

With a Project 2025 handbook of nearly 1,000 pages and an army of Americans, the goal is to have the civilian infrastructure ready by day one to requisition, reshape and abolish what Republicans deride as the deep state bureaucracy , in part by shooting as many as 50,000 federal employees.

We need to flood the zone with conservatives, says Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project and former Trump administration official, who speaks of this venture with historical flair.

This is a clear call to come to Washington, he said. People need to put down their tools, leave their professional lives behind and say, This is my lifelong moment to serve.

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The unprecedented effort is being orchestrated with dozens of right-wing organizations, many of them new to Washington, and represents a changed approach from conservatives, who have traditionally sought to limit the federal government by cutting federal taxes and slashing federal spending.

Instead, Trump-era conservatives want to improve the administrative state from the inside out, by firing federal employees who they believe are getting in the way of the president’s agenda, and replacing them with like-minded officials eager to create a new management approach.

The goal is to avoid the pitfalls of Trump’s first years in office, when the Republican presidential team was ill-prepared, his cabinet candidates struggled to get Senate confirmation, and the policy met resistance from lawmakers, administration officials, and even Trump’s own appointees who refused. to bend or break protocol, or in some cases break laws, to further his goals.

While many of the Project 2025 proposals are inspired by Trump, they are echoed by Republican rivals Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy and are gaining prominence among other Republicans.

And if Trump wins a second term, the work of the Heritage coalition will ensure the president has the staff to continue his unfinished business in the White House.

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President Day One will be a wrecking ball for the administrative state, said Russ Vought, a former Trump administration official involved in the effort who now serves as president of the conservative Center for Renewing America.

Much of the incoming president’s agenda would be accomplished through the reinstatement of what’s been called Schedule F, a Trump-era executive order that would reclassify tens of thousands of the two million federal employees as essentially volunteer workers who could more easily be dismissed.

Biden had rescinded the executive order upon taking office in 2021, but Trump and other presidential hopefuls are now vowing to reinstate the order.

It frightens me, says Mary Guy, a professor of public administration at the University of Colorado Denver, who warns that the idea would lead to a return to a system of political spoils.

Experts argue that Schedule F would create chaos in the civil service, which was overhauled during the presidency

Jimmy

Carter’s administration in an effort to ensure a professional workforce and end 19th century political prejudice.

As it stands, only 4,000 members of the federal workforce are considered political appointees, which typically change with each administration. But Schedule F could put tens of thousands of professional jobs at risk.

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We have a democracy in danger

suicide,” said Guy. ‘Plan

F is just one more bullet in the gun.”

Guy said.

The ideas in Heritage coffee

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table-ready books are both aspirational and parochial, a mix of long

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standing conservative policies and strong, high-profile proposals that rose to prominence in the Trump era.

A major overhaul of the Justice Department is underway, notably curtailing its independence and ending the FBI’s efforts to curb the spread of disinformation. It calls for intensified prosecution of anyone who provides or distributes abortion pills by mail.

There are proposals to have the Pentagon scrap its recent diversity, equality and inclusion initiatives, what the project calls the wake agenda, and to reinstate military personnel who have been discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.

Chapter by chapter, the pages provide a guide to the next president, similar to a Heritage produced fifty years ago, before the Ronald Reagan administration. Written by some of the conservative movement’s most prominent contemporary thinkers, it is often laced with apocalyptic language.

A chapter written by Trump’s former acting Vice Secretary of Homeland Security calls for increasing the number of political appointees and redeploying office workers with law enforcement capabilities to the field to maximize law enforcement capacity.

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At the White House, the book suggests that the new administration should reexamine the tradition of providing workspace for the press corps and ensure White House counsel is deeply involved in the president’s agenda.

Conservatives have long had a grim view of federal government offices, complaining that they are full of liberals seeking to pursue Republican agendas.

But Doreen Greenwald, national president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said most federal employees live in the United States and are your neighbors, family and friends. Federal employees are not the enemy, she said.

While presidents typically depend on Congress to enact policy, the Heritage project leans toward what legal scholars call a unitary view of the executive branch, suggesting that the president has broad authority to act alone.

To get past senators trying to block presidential candidates, Project 2025 proposes installing top allies in acting administrative positions, as was done during the Trump administration to bypass the Senate confirmation process.

John McEntee, another former Trump official who advised on this effort, said the next administration “could play a little harder than we did with Congress.”

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In fact, Congress would see its role diminish, for example, with a proposal to abolish Congressional notification of certain foreign arms sales.

Philip Wallach, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies separation of powers and was not part of the Heritage project, said the president’s abilities are in some way fantasized.

Some of these visions are just starting to turn into some kind of authoritarian fantasies where the president won the election so he’s in charge so everyone has to do what he says and that’s just not the system.

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the government we live under, he said.

At the Heritage office, Dans has a faded photo on the wall of an earlier era in Washington, with the White House almost alone in the city, dirt streets in every direction.

It is a picture of what conservatives have long wanted: a smaller federal government.

The Heritage coalition takes off with its recruiting efforts and crosses America to fill the federal jobs. They staffed the Iowa State Fair this month and signed up hundreds of people, and they’re building a database of potential employees, inviting them to be trained in government operations.

It’s counterintuitive: Dans acknowledged the idea of ​​joining the government to shrink it, but he said that’s the lesson we’ve learned from the Trump days about what it takes to “take back control.” to get’.