Project 2025's 'Root and Branch' Doctrine: Revolutionary Executive Power Dressed as National Security
Pages 45–46 of Mandate for Leadership frame sweeping bureaucratic dismantlement — 'ripping out the trees, root and branch' — as the only legitimate response to China policy failures and elite betrayal. The rhetoric moves well beyond policy reform: it explicitly rejects incremental governance ('not to tinker with this or that government program, to replace this or that bureaucrat') in favor of wholesale institutional demolition. Bundled with legitimate concerns about CCP espionage and trade policy are calls to abandon international agreements, end economic engagement, and override the career civil service that actually implements national-security law. The framing is a textbook authoritarian consolidation move — conflating the bureaucracy with the enemy so that dismantling oversight feels patriotic.
authoritarian_playbook_match: Protect Democracy's Authoritarian Playbook identifies 'Politicizing Independent Institutions' as the first standard tactic of democratic backsliding: 'Authoritarians attack and seek to capture those institutions.' Levitsky and Ziblatt's work documents how this capture is most effective when framed as emergency response to an external enemy. The 'root and branch' passage fits that pattern precisely — the enemy (CCP, elites) is used to justify dismantling the neutral institutions that would otherwise check the executive conducting the dismantling.
Original source — excerpted
project2025 Project 2025 ch. 2: Executive Office of the President (pp 45-46)"— 12 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise manufacturing jobs. (“Learn to code!” they would gloat.) These were just the price of progress. Engagement was at every step Beijing’s project, not America’s. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) dictated terms, only to break them whenever it suited them. They stole our technology, spied on our people, and threatened our allies, all with trillions of dollars of wealth and military power financed by their access to our market. Then came the rise of Big Tech, which is now less a contributor to the U.S. economy than it is a tool of China’s government. In exchange for cheap labor and regulatory special treatment from Beijing, America’s largest technology firms funnel data about Americans to the CCP . They hand over sensitive intellectual property with military and intelligence applications to keep the money rolling in. They let Beijing censor Chinese users on their platforms. They let the CCP set their corporate policies about mobile apps. And they run interference for our rival’s political priorities in Washington. One side of Big-Tech companies’ business model is old-fashioned American competitiveness and world-chan…"