Project 2025's DOD Personnel Doctrine: Schedule F, Loyalty Purges, and the Erosion of Nonpartisan Defense Analysis
Project 2025's civil-service proposals—reinstating Schedule F, freezing career hiring, and reweighting layoff criteria toward presidential discretion—would strip nonpartisan analysts and auditors from the Department of Defense at the precise moment the Pentagon has failed every financial audit since 2018 and the IC most needs analysts willing to deliver unwelcome findings.
The accountability mechanism most directly threatened here is the nonpartisan career civil service inside the national-security apparatus—the auditors, budget analysts, program evaluators, and intelligence analysts whose professional independence is the only structural check on politicized decision-making at the DOD and across the intelligence community. Project 2025 frames Schedule F and aggressive hiring freezes as cures for 'impenetrable bureaucracy,' but the actual target is the independence of the people who file dissenting assessments, flag unsupported journal entries, and challenge overclassification. Stripping those employees of merit-system protections does not make the bureaucracy leaner; it makes it more obedient.
The DOD has failed every financial audit since audits began in 2018. The FY2023 audit, like its predecessors, identified unsupported journal entries running into the trillions of dollars in aggregate across DOD's balance sheet — a figure the Pentagon's own comptroller has acknowledged publicly. The Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy News has documented for years that overclassification already shields enormous cost data — including the aggregate cost of intelligence-community operations — from any meaningful congressional or public scrutiny. Proposals that expand Schedule F inside the defense and intelligence bureaucracies would accelerate both pathologies: career employees who flag audit failures or challenge classification decisions would face termination at will, removing the institutional incentive to surface inconvenient truths. The Church Committee's core finding in 1975 was that concentrated, unaccountable executive power inside the intelligence community produces abuse; Project 2025's personnel doctrine recreates precisely that concentration.
The strategic risk is not abstract. The Iraq 2003 intelligence failure is the canonical modern case of what happens when political pressure suppresses analytic dissent: bad intelligence, catastrophic policy, and a war the Brown University Costs of War Project estimates cost more than $2 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives. A defense and intelligence workforce that can be fired for delivering unwelcome findings is a workforce that will stop delivering unwelcome findings. That is not a personnel-management efficiency gain; it is a pre-condition for the next preventable strategic disaster.
The concrete reform rooted in restraint and oversight runs in the opposite direction: strengthen, not weaken, the Inspector General system at DOD; expand mandatory declassification timelines so audit and cost data cannot be hidden behind classification guidance; protect — under a reinforced Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act — any career employee who raises financial irregularities or challenges politicized analytic products; and require the Secretary of Defense to certify to Congress annually that no Schedule F reclassification has been applied to any position whose primary function is financial audit, program evaluation, or intelligence analysis. Accountability is not anti-military. The Pentagon's own auditors have said so for six consecutive years. Silencing them is.
Original source — excerpted
project2025 Project 2025 ch. 4: Department of Defense (pp 112-113)"— 79 — Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy What is needed at the beginning is a freeze on all top career-position hiring to prevent “burrowing-in” by outgoing political appointees. Moreover, four fac - tors determine the order in which employees are protected during layoffs: tenure, veterans’ preference, seniority, and performance in that order of importance. Despite several attempts in the House of Representatives during the Trump years to enact legislation that would modestly increase the weight given to performance over time-of-service, the fierce opposition by federal managers associations and unions representing long-serving but not necessarily well-performing constituents explains why the bills failed to advance. A determined President should insist that performance be first and be wary of costly types of reductions-in-force. Impenetrable Bureaucracy. The GAO has identified almost a hundred actions that the executive branch or Congress could take to improve efficiency and effec- tiveness across 37 areas that span a broad range of government missions and functions. It identified 33 actions to address mission fragmentation, overlap, and duplication…"