Project 2025's 'Administrative State' Agenda: Purging Expertise, Criminalizing Dissent, Defunding Accountability
Project 2025's Foreword frames dismantling the 'administrative state' as restoring constitutional order, but its specific proposals — stripping federal funding from schools that teach disfavored curricula, conflating gender-affirming care with criminality, and outlawing speech deemed 'pornographic' — would concentrate unchecked executive power while eliminating the career experts, civil-rights enforcers, and independent overseers who protect the public from that power.
The Foreword's call to 'dismantle the administrative state' sounds like civic housecleaning, but its operational content is something far more specific: it would deploy federal spending power as a political weapon against states, localities, school boards, and educators who teach content the next conservative president disapproves of. Threatening to cut off federal funds from any school whose employees 'disagree' with the administration on parental rights or curriculum is not a constitutional restoration — it is coercive federal commandeering of local governance, the precise overreach the Tenth Amendment was meant to prevent. The career lawyers, civil-rights investigators, and education-department enforcement staff who would ordinarily review such spending conditions for legal compliance are exactly the 'administrative state' the document wants to dismantle.
The proposal to categorically strip First Amendment protection from 'transgender ideology' — and to imprison educators and librarians who teach materials deemed pornographic — directly threatens the federal civil servants and grant recipients whose job is to enforce equal-access and anti-discrimination law under Title IX and the Civil Rights Act. Removing or politicizing those career enforcement officers, as Schedule F would enable, means no neutral arbiter remains between ideological edict and the communities harmed by it. Protect Democracy's Authoritarian Playbook identifies exactly this pattern: using scapegoating of vulnerable minorities as both political weapon and smokescreen for consolidating executive control.
The document's lament that Congress 'no longer meaningfully budgets' is accurate but cynically deployed. The constitutional remedy for a broken appropriations process is congressional reform — restoring regular order, strengthening the Budget Act's enforcement mechanisms, and reasserting the power of the purse — not handing the executive branch discretionary authority to defund disfavored agencies or redirect appropriations through impoundment, which the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 expressly prohibits. Unilateral executive budget control is not constitutionalism; it is the unitary-executive maximalism that Jack Goldsmith and Bob Bauer warned dismantles the interbranch checks that make self-governance real.
A democratically accountable alternative would look like this: codify Schedule F's repeal in statute so career civil servants retain merit-based protections regardless of which party holds the White House; strengthen inspector general independence through the IG Independence and Empowerment Act; preserve Senate confirmation norms so political appointees face genuine scrutiny; and channel legitimate concerns about curriculum, technology, and family policy through legislative deliberation rather than executive funding threats. The goal should be a government that is leaner where statute permits and more expert where the public interest demands — not one that replaces neutral competence with ideological loyalty.
Original source — excerpted
project2025 Project 2025 ch. 1: White House Office (pp 38-39)"— 5 — Foreword (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensi - tive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists. Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered. In our schools, the question of parental authority over their child…"