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Notes -
I don't know if you know all this or not, so my apologies if this is repeating the obvious.
You have the basic concept right. A lot of stuff in Project 2025 is the kind of stuff that's been in every Republican Party Platform at the national convention, on every Republican Presidential Candidate website, in lots of Heritage Foundation white papers, etc. The actual stuff they want to do is neither particularly surprising nor frightening.
What does make it a game changer is the creation of lists of state-level experts willing to serve in a Republican administration and pursue these goals, along with a plan to expand the spoils system such that a huge number of government functionaries will be fired
Republicans/Conservatives have been hamstrung for decades by the dynamics of government work. In many ways from the New Deal onward, but certainly accelerating since Reagan, growing worse under Bush II, and critical under Trump. The people who go into Government aren't Republicans by attitude, and people who are Republicans by attitude don't go into government work. In the same way cops are mostly Republicans because young Democrats don't tend to become cops, EPA staffers are mostly Democrats because young Republicans mostly don't want to work for the EPA. As a result, even when an R admin takes over in the White House, they can appoint a new Republican department head, but that department head can only direct a vast number of Democrats. /u/Tracingwoodgrains has provided a recent overview of how this works in the legal field, where the Federalist society has created what amounts to a list of Republican leaning law students, who are maneuvered into clerking for Republican leaning judges, who then move on to become Republican leaning judges. They've been able to keep the courts relatively split and the conservative bench well stocked, even as it's increasingly hard to find a Republican at HYS tier law schools.
Project 2025 will promise to do the same, but for the EPA and OSHA and HUD.
That is a reasonable thing for Democrats to fear. The destruction of one of their major structural advantages would be a cataclysm. The reclassification of a vast number of jobs as political appointees would also absolutely cripple government for decades, because Democrats would be forced to in turn fire and hire a vast number of people every four to eight years. The resulting chaos would make government slower, even when Democrats win. Rather than having career bureaucrats who have a home field advantage in the bureaucracy, you'll have guys who just heard of this regulation for the very first time. Combined with the recent changes to Chevron, bureaucrats will be on a much more even footing with citizens going up against them. Republicans will say this is making government more responsive to voters and rooting out the administrative state's antidemocratic self-preservation instinct; Democrats will say it is disarming the army and then saying well the army can't protect us so we better surrender. Both, to some degree, have a point.
A side note being, while high-level career bureaucrats have long been political appointees flowing in and out of power with admin changes, there has been an ecosystem on both sides of think-tanks and academia and corporate sinecures to absorb those folks when they are out of power. But what will they do with more low-level staff being swung in and out? What will happen to the entire city of DC when a huge portion of its workforce is being hired and fired constantly?
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