There can be no meaningful change without a shared reality

My series on Project 2025 continues

Welcome to the third edition of The Preamble, my newsletter that will help you feel more confident in your knowledge about how government and politics work in the United States.

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And now, on to the third installment of my series on Project 2025.

“There isn’t supposed to be a check on the president by his own employees,” Project 2025 Director Paul Dans told me. “That’s kind of a post-Watergate system where ultimately it’s led to this deep state where you have an unelected unaccountable bureaucracy that goes against the agenda of the elected president.”

As an aside: Can we just collectively agree to stop using the phrase “deep state?” Deep state has been co-opted by Q-Anon believers who think that JFK Jr is going to come back from the dead after 25 years and take his rightful place as Donald Trump’s VP.. 

We can’t make meaningful change without a shared reality.

Paul Dans’ point is true. Some of the employees in the federal bureaucracy did actively try to thwart Trump’s agenda. The Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security, Miles Taylor, wrote an Op-Ed in The New York Times, anonymously at first (he later revealed his identity), called “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.”

In the article, Taylor said:
“The dilemma – which he [Trump] does not fully grasp – is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”

“I would know. I am one of them.”

Taylor went on, “The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.”

The article was written in 2018. Taylor said then that Trump’s impulses were anti-democratic, and that he was “impetuous, adversarial, petty, and ineffective,” and because of that, senior administration officials, ranging from White House staff to executive agencies, were privately admitting their disbelief at his actions and quietly working to insulate their departments from his actions. 

It is this idea that Project 2025 is tackling, but using coded language like “wokeism” and “deep state.” Many of the people involved in Project 2025 don’t like that Trump wasn’t able to do whatever he wanted in office, because some of the career civil servants were actively trying to mitigate his actions.

The answer to this problem of a president having their agenda thwarted by the bureaucracy is to return to a pre-Watergate system in which the president was able to place the executive branch employees more fully under their control.

But therein lies the problem. Nixon, with more control, was able to get the bureaucracy to do his bidding. Nixon and his closest allies found people to commit crimes on their behalf. They drugged and imprisoned Martha Mitchell, the wife of one of Nixon’s cronies, in a hotel room. They plotted Operation Gemstone, in which people were to be kidnapped and held in Mexico until after the election. The plan wanted to use prostitutes and LSD.

After Watergate, forty government officials were indicted or went to prison.

So this idea that things were better, from a personnel perspective, pre-Watergate, when the federal bureaucracy was held more tightly under a president’s control? It doesn’t hold water.

More presidential control of the federal bureaucracy is associated with more corruption. Power concentrated in the hands of a single individual is not more democratic than power that is shared.

It’s one of the arguments the architects of Project 2025 use, but then don’t follow it to its logical conclusion. If the problem is too much power in the hands of the federal government, we should fix that by returning the power to the states, they say. The power should be shared to prevent tyranny.

But then, Project 2025 calls for the opposite when it comes to the executive branch. Power should not be shared, it should be concentrated in the hands of a single individual. An individual who may or may not have good intentions.

“Aren’t you worried that these proposed changes (what Project 2025 says should be the beginning of a 100 year reform effort) could have unintended consequences and be used against you in the future?” I asked. “What if someone is elected with Hitlerian inclinations? Elections don’t always mean someone good will be in charge.”

Neither Dans nor Devine seem to think this is a problem. 

Me: “Would these reforms you’re proposing not then allow somebody who is currently your political adversary to get elected and then consolidate power at an alarming rate? You say these reforms would be more democratic, but do you have concerns that somebody with a different ideological viewpoint could use these reforms against the American public in a way you would find alarming or disturbing?”

Dans: “Not at all. We already experienced that. Ninety-five percent of the federal workforce is already decidedly left. So I am not at all concerned that the left would use this to re-empower themselves. They’re already fully in power. The entire progressive architecture was built by them for their own ends, and it’s against the constitution.” 

Photo by Ana Lanza on Unsplash

Let’s address these claims.

1. 95% of the federal workforce is decidedly left.
This is easily disprovable. One study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2021 found that outside of political appointees, who are generally considered partisan, researchers found “virtually no political cycles in the career civil service,” and that the civil service is “largely protected from political interference.”

Secondly, this study found that there are more Democrats in the civil service than Republicans.

But the percentage of Democrats, determined by matching personnel data with voter registration? 50%. (Again, this is outside the political appointee realm, which is around .23% of the federal bureaucracy.)

There are some executive departments (agriculture, transportation) that have higher percentages of Republicans, and some (the EPA, the Department of Education) that have higher percentages of Democrats. But the overall percentage of Democrats across the civil service? 50%. This is data pulled from over two decades, 1997-2019, and encompassing multiple presidential administrations.

We cannot make meaningful change without a shared reality.

2. The entire progressive architecture was built by them for their own ends.

The “progressive architecture” Dans is talking about is again, the federal bureaucracy. The claim is that the left has built the administrative state, and they are now wielding its power to thwart the conservative agenda.

So then why do the federal bureaucracy size statistics look like this?

Ronald Reagan: +0%

George HW Bush: +1.8%

Bill Clinton: -15.2%

George W Bush: +7.9%

Barack Obama: +3.9%

Donald Trump: +5.7%

Joe Biden (as of 2023): +2.5%

This is all data pulled from the Office of Management and Budget that shows the size of the bureaucracy in the final fiscal year of the start of their presidency, compared to the fiscal year of their last year in office (with the exception, obviously, of Biden).

Where is the evidence that the federal bureaucracy was constructed by the left for their own ends? The numbers show an overall increase in workforce under Republican presidents of +15.4% since 1980. And under Democrats, an overall decrease of -8.8%.

We cannot make meaningful change without a shared reality.

You can absolutely make an argument that we should reform the civil service. And I would happily have that conversation. How do we attract the best people? How do we evaluate them? How do we retain them? What is the best size of the federal workforce? Should an increase in US population mean an increase in the size of the bureaucracy? How competitive should wages be with the private sector? What kind of benefits should be provided?

These are all legitimate debates we can and should have. But none of those debates can occur without a set of facts that we can all agree on.

One thing that Dans continued to bring up is that it’s the view of the Heritage Foundation that Project 2025 benefits democracy. I asked him, specifically, how.

Because the president is elected, he said, that’s a mandate for leadership. When the people elect President Smith or President Jones, they are sending that person to Washington, DC with the task of enacting the vision they have for America. And making the bureaucrats comply with the president’s vision is ultimately more democratic, he feels, than having an independent bureaucracy.

I disagree. And so do other former Republican officials.

In a letter to Congress last week, several national security officials under George W. Bush said that yes, we should improve the civil service. But, “Public service, whether in uniform or otherwise, ought to be based exclusively on qualifications and merit. Nothing else matters, and in our view, political fealty—however it may be operationalized—does not equate to accountability.”

And this is where it’s clear these former officials—like the former Secretary of the Navy and the former Director of National Intelligence—diverge from proposals like the ones put forward by Project 2025.

The former officials say:
”We believe that our career civil servants, our civilian employees, are a national resource, and they must be protected by due process. In our decades of experience overseeing large, complex national security organizations under both Democratic and Republican Presidents, these individuals have always brought unrivaled technical expertise, institutional memory, and the ability to navigate complex bureaucracies that are truly priceless. Proposals that allow political loyalty to be substituted for merit in their ranks—even in the name of greater accountability—pose a significant risk.”

In other words, politicizing the civil service does not lead to greater accountability. And it poses a significant national security risk.

In a pluralistic society where power can and must be shared, meaningful change can only happen when we start from the same shared understanding. How can we find a system that creates accountability for civil servants while not requiring political fealty?

We have to drop the coded language and the conspiracy theories, for starters. And both sides have to approach the conversation from a position of humility. “Here are the ways I am willing to admit we might be getting it wrong and need to improve.”

More tomorrow.

Paid subscribers: leave me a comment with your questions, and I’ll do my best to answer in this week’s video. 

Be sure to check out this week’s podcast episode. I’m speaking with Paul Sparrow, director of the FDR Presidential Library, about how the 1930s are looking similar to what we’re seeing today in the United States.

His new book is:  Awakening the Spirit of America: FDR's War of Words With Charles Lindbergh―and the Battle to Save Democracy.

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