Project 2025's Civil Service Overhaul Would Strip DOD and IC of Career Expertise, Enabling Politicized Intelligence
Project 2025's diagnosis of civil service dysfunction is used to justify dismantling merit protections across the federal government, including the DOD and intelligence community — the precise institutions where career expertise and insulation from partisan pressure are strategic necessities, not bureaucratic luxuries.
Project 2025 frames the merit civil service as a progressive experiment gone wrong — a self-protecting bureaucracy immune to accountability. There is a narrow legitimate concern buried here: the GAO has documented that performance ratings have become nearly uniform and pay-for-performance has eroded. But the document's remedy — reinstatement and expansion of Schedule F, aggressive use of presidential appointment power, and elimination of disparate-impact hiring doctrine — is disproportionate to the diagnosis and directly threatens the institutions that most require nonpartisan expertise: the Department of Defense and the intelligence community.
The Church Committee's 1975 findings established the foundational lesson of IC reform: when intelligence agencies are staffed or directed by political loyalists rather than professional analysts, the result is not better intelligence but weaponized intelligence. The Iraq 2003 WMD failure — extensively documented — traced directly to pressure on career analysts to conform their assessments to predetermined policy conclusions. Schedule F, applied to the broad category of policy-influencing federal positions defined in Executive Order 13957 (estimated by analysts and press reporting at tens of thousands of positions, though the order itself specifies no headcount), would extend that same pressure across the entire national security apparatus, making it trivially easy to remove any analyst whose findings are inconvenient to the sitting administration. The Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy News reporting documents how overclassification already shields executive-branch misconduct from scrutiny; a politicized workforce would only deepen that pathology.
The accountability mechanisms actually weakened here are multiple and interlocking: the Pendleton Act's prohibition on spoils-based hiring, the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978's whistleblower and adverse-action protections, and the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act's guarantee that analysts can report politicization to congressional oversight committees without career destruction. Project 2025 frames these protections as obstacles to executive efficiency. In the defense and intelligence context, they are the early-warning system that tells policymakers what they do not want to hear — the precise function that prevents strategic disasters.
The reform-rooted alternative is straightforward: fix performance appraisal rigor through transparent, auditable rating systems with genuine distributional requirements, as the CSRA originally intended; restore and fund the DOD Inspector General and IC Inspector General with statutory independence; strengthen, not weaken, ICWPA referral rights to congressional intelligence committees; and apply Costs of War Project-style systematic auditing to defense contracts and personnel systems. Accountability flows from transparency and enforceable civil service independence — not from making every career professional fireable at a partisan official's discretion.
Original source — excerpted
project2025 Project 2025 ch. 4: Department of Defense (pp 104-105)"— 71 — Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy progressives have sought a system that could effectively select, train, reward, and guard from partisan influence the neutral scientific experts they believe are required to staff the national government and run the administrative state. Their U.S. system was initiated by the Pendleton Act of 1883 10 and institutionalized by the 1930s New Deal to set principles and practices that were meant to ensure that expert merit rather than partisan favors or personal favoritism ruled within the federal bureaucracy. Yet, as public frustration with the civil service has grown, generating calls to “drain the swamp,” it has become clear that their project has had serious unintended consequences. The civil service was devised to replace the amateurism and presumed corrup- tion of the old spoils system, wherein government jobs rewarded loyal partisans who might or might not have professional backgrounds. Although the system appeared to be sufficient for the nation’s first century, progressive intellectuals and activists demanded a more professionalized, scientific, and politically neutral Administration. Progressives designe…"