When I first heard about Project 2025, I had no idea what it was. If I had to guess at the time, I would have guessed it was some plan to plant a certain number of trees by 2025 or help raise money or awareness for an important cause. Reality, however, was disappointing.
In essence, Project 2025 is a roadmap, created by many conservative groups, for reorganizing the federal government if Trump is elected again. It consists of disbanding or defunding many different agencies and departments in the federal government and reclassifying many different positions and jobs to hire people based solely on loyalty.
Among the targets of Project 2025 is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is the agency responsible for providing weather forecasts, storm warnings and a variety of other services upon which we all depend. The reason the people behind Project 2025 wish to eliminate NOAA is because it is behind “the climate change alarm industry.”
Just to recap: from simple methods, like histories of recorded temperature extremes or polar ice coverage, to more complicated analyses, like ratios of oxygen isotopes in ice cores, we know climate change is BOTH real and anthropogenic. In summary, Project 2025 wishes to disband NOAA because NOAA is worried about a very real threat.
Among the other targets for disbandment is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Quite frankly, if the FBI was either dismantled or largely defunded, our country’s ability to combat cybercrime, terrorism and foreign espionage would decrease substantially.
Those three areas are, due to the nature of the crime, among the many types of crime that local/state-level law enforcement agencies are not prepared to combat in a coordinated manner. As for other more common types of crime, such as violent crime, white collar crime and corruption, the FBI still plays a significant role in conducting important investigations.
In addition to these agencies, other groups and programs that are the target for defunding or dismantlement are the Department of Justice as a whole, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Head Start Program and the Department of Education as a whole.
While I believe all these groups and programs to be critical components and functions of our government, I do not view their potential demise as the most consequential ramification of Project 2025. That distinction belongs to Schedule F.
Schedule F was a Trump-era executive order (thankfully reversed by the Biden administration) that erased protections held by many civil-service employees. The civil-service employees in question could, in theory, range from botanists at the EPA to inspectors at the FDA – jobs for which you want experts, scientists and similar professionals with degrees and/or relevant experience. The protections that Schedule F sought to do away with are meant to prevent these types of employees from being fired by the President for disloyalty.
Project 2025’s official line is that they want to make sure the people implementing policy have goals that align with the President’s. What this means in practice, however, as demonstrated by an incident that happened during Trump’s presidency, is that random employees get questioned as to why they voted in a Democratic primary.
There is a long history of scandal behind why the federal government chose to switch from loyalty to expertise as the determinant of one’s ability to be a part of the civil service. The groups and people behind Project 2025 wish to reverse that, ostensibly for the sake of streamlining the bureaucracy and creating coherent policy.
The real result, however, would be a massive loss of expertise and competence that would more than erase any potential gains in efficiency while also hurting people who might benefit from the services these people, programs, agencies and departments provide.
Janagan Ramanathan is a Sartell High School alum, former U.S. Naval Academy midshipman and current aerospace engineering major at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
