Day 47 — January 16, 2025
Details emerged this week that the incoming Trump administration is already prying into the nonpolitical employees of the National Security Council—including about their political views and loyalty to the incoming president. According to the Associated Press, employees are being asked “who they voted for in the 2024 election, their political contributions and whether they have made social media posts that could be considered incriminating by President-elect Donal Trump’s team.”
To ensure loyalty, the incoming National Security Advisor “signaled” his intention “to get rid of all nonpolitical appointees and career intelligence officials serving on the NSC by Inauguration Day.”
Also this week, the Speaker of the House removed the chair of the House Intelligence Committee—an Ohio Republican named Mike Turner who had shown some independence on matters involving Russia and Ukraine.
The NSC news is a small but ominous hint of much bigger moves to come.
As a reminder of the broader Trump/Project 2025 plan that is already underway, let me present a passage from my book “2025,” which is also now a PODCAST. The scene imagines one of the last remaining public health experts at the top of the US government (in March 2025), about to by replaced by one of many unqualified Trump loyalists, as the risk of an avian flu outbreak emerges in the Midwest. (I wrote this all last summer, btw):
“They had been meeting formally all fall, through January, alarmed at growing signs that avian flu in livestock in the south and midwest was on the verge of spreading to humans. Only one bad mutation and sloppy response from a true crisis.
The drama of the election and the victory of a science-denying candidate had kept the risk out of the national spotlight….America was largely clueless about the potential for its next great crisis.
But no more clueless, Yvette thought, than the faces that were now around the table, the ones who’d replaced all those experts and scientists since January. Together, the new crew turned to look Yvette’s way following Chip’s absurd tirade.
Eight white men. One white woman. Most had shown up for the first time at the February meeting, held deep in the dingy bowels of the gargantuan Old Executive Office Building. They’d moved the meeting site from the West Wing as part of the elimination of the Office for Pandemic Preparedness—the second time in eight years the same president had eliminated the office. Even though the first time had left the country unprepared for COVID-19 in 2020, no one who’d learned that from the first administration was back now. This new administration wanted to again bury the thing through this less formal task force, hide it in the bowels of the bureaucracy, and stick a partisan political hack at its helm. Meaning politics would motivate the work, not science. Not real prevention.
Three more new faces joined them for this meeting. As they introduced themselves, two of the three struggled to get their titles out right….
Only Yvette and Dr. Turekian appreciated the dramatic trade down American had made in such a short time.
Among them, the public health experts whom these people replaced had more than two centuries of the world’s richest experience researching and tracking and preventing the disease they were now confronting. Scientists and researchers and security experts. Doctors and veterinarians. All at the top of their fields. And critically, they’d worked together long enough that they comprised a lithe, interconnected web of pandemic fighters.
The new president and his allies loved villainizing them all. Right-wing media and Congress piled on. The truth was, they were public safety superheroes.
Back when they met as the formal preparedness team, they’d conducted table-top exercises, simulations, and on-the-ground operations. Gaming out every aspect of an avian flu outbreak—from the initial wave of death and panic, to the disruption of the food chain, to the impact on the broader economic and supply chain, to the likelihood of civil unrest. They’d played it all out, challenged every assumption, refined every contingency plan, and all that work had led to the playbook Yvette had in front of her. No group was better prepared on the planet for what they faced.
And all that preparation—following the playbook to a tee—had come to the rescue when initial signs of avian flu popped up in milk and meat facilities last fall. Working with a network of state health and medical directors, industry representatives, National Academy of Sciences experts, ag and livestock biologists, and others, they’d been holding the risk at bay through active testing, monitoring and containment measures. Putting out fire after fire. But with all their talent and planning, they still worried sick it would not be enough.
Now, Yvette looked out at the ruins of it all.
Chip and the new president had disbanded the team in January. Then, one at a time, they’d ousted the experts from government entirely….
The new people staring at her remained silent for the second straight meeting. From what she had gathered from LinkedIn and press announcements, they were there largely due to recent political activity, fierce anti-science ideology or industry ties, or some combination of the three. Several had been local politicians—a city councilman, a county commissioner and a state rep. The experience that got them in the door was having set the budget for a local health department, or sewer system, or chairing a health subcommittee. No direct experience. A little more digging showed that two had even been fake electors from the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, rewarded for their loyalty.
On paper, the brightest at the table were transplants from right-wing think tanks—smart, but wrong, driven by ideology. From those high-paying and corporate-backed ivory towers, they’d written tomes recommending the exact opposite of the playbook’s guidance. One had expounded on herd immunity as the best solution, citing pseudo-studies from small countries. Let it spread fast, he advocated. Which, Yvette and the shadow cabinet knew, would kill millions.”
This is just the scene from one table, dealing with one crisis.
Now imagine similar gatherings that are about to convene around national security tables. Or those dealing with extreme weather events. Or diplomatic or economic crises.
Loyalty over experience and expertise is about to be the MO of the US government. And they’ve been working on the plan for a year…
Project 2025: The Actual Plan
Trump, JD Vance and Project 2025 were crystal clear that the first move of their right-wing takeover of American government would be the displacement of tens of thousands of non-partisan civil servants with political and personal loyalists.
As Vance spelled out long before being named as Trump’s VP: “I think that what Trump should do, like if I was giving him one piece of advice, fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people, and when the courts, because you will get taken to court, and then when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say the Chief Justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.”
Recruiting and Training Loyalists
Project 2025’s opening pages spell out the same approach—explaining that the new administration’s overall success requires a “trained and committed cadre of personnel to implement” the overall plan. (Page xiii) “Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.” (Page xiv)
And the first Chapter of Project 2025 — “Taking the Reins of Government” — focuses on how “the new Administration must fill its ranks with political appointees…. Empowering political appointees across the Administration is crucial to a President’s success.” (Page 20).
“Political appointees who are answerable to the President and have decision-making authority in the executive branch are key to this essential task. The next Administration must not cede such authority to non-partisan “experts,” who pursue their own ends while engaging in groupthink, insulated from American voters.”
The plan continues: “Any new Administration would be wise to learn that it will need a full cadre of sound political appointees from the beginning if it expects to direct this enormous federal bureaucracy.” (Page 82)
But the plan’s authors didn’t just propose all this. They’ve been working on it for a year
A big part of Project 2025 was its ongoing effort to recruit and train political loyalists to enter the new government through the “Presidential Administration Academy, an online educational system taught by experts from our coalition. For the newcomer, this will explain how the government functions and how to function in government.”
The goal is to recruit at least “20,000 new foot soldiers.”
They began airing a recruiting video early last year, instructing their recruits: “It’s your job to ensure that that power is executed…in line with the President’s will.” (now viewed 56K times).
Replacing Civil Servants and Experts with Loyalists
With this new army of political foot solders in place, Project 2025 and its backers don’t mince words about their goal: “Bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”
How? As JD Vance says— “fire ‘every civil servant in the administrative state.’”
In everyday speak, that means get rid of experts and scientists who are in the government because of their expertise—and not politics or loyalty. Trust in these employees is the problem, according to Project 2025—“the progressive ideology that unelected experts can and should be trusted to promote the general welfare in just about every area of social life.” (Page 83).
So Project 2025 aims to end this approach: “A conservative President must move swiftly to do away with these vast abuses of presidential power and remove the career and political bureaucrats who fuel it.” (Page 8) He must “bring the Administrative State to heel, and in the process defang and defund the woke culture warriors who have infiltrated every last institution in America.” (Page 9). Project 2025 “…lays out how to use many of these tools including: how to fire supposedly “un-fireable” federal bureaucrats.” (Page 9)
How? It’s Called Schedule F
The vehicle to get this done is called Schedule F — where the administration is “to prepare lists of such confidential, policy-determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating positions and prepare procedures to create exceptions from civil service rules when careerists hold such positions.” (Page 80)
Trump tried this toward the end of his presidency, but Biden rescinded the order before it took effect.
Currently, there are around 4,000 political appointees in the federal government. Project 2025 aims to bring that number to at least 50,000—but this “is probably a floor rather than a ceiling, which will ultimately be determined by a highly politicized leadership that might want to clean house.”
“They are stating unequivocally that federal employees must give their loyalty to the president, and that he or she should be able to remove anyone insufficiently devoted to the cause.”
For a broader primer on Schedule F, go HERE.
The NSC news shows it’s all well underway.
Share this post