Project 2025's ONDCP Politicization Plan: Replacing Career Expertise with Partisan Loyalty
Project 2025 explicitly calls for replacing the career official who traditionally oversees the ONDCP budget with a political appointee, and directs the ONDCP Director to ensure grants fund 'the President's drug control priorities' rather than be managed by professionals. This substitutes partisan loyalty for institutional expertise in a $41 billion federal drug control apparatus.
The source text states plainly that 'it is imperative that a political appointee lead the ONDCP budget office' — overturning a tradition of career oversight — and instructs that grant programs must fund 'the President's drug control priorities and not woke nonprofits with leftist policy agendas.' This is not administrative reform; it is the explicit subordination of a $41 billion grant and budget operation to partisan ideological screening.
The accountability mechanism being weakened here is career civil service insulation of grant-making and budget functions. Career officials in these roles provide continuity, institutional knowledge, and a check against the use of federal grant dollars as partisan reward-and-punishment instruments. The source text is unusually candid about the goal: it explicitly warns against 'management by political or career military personnel who oversaw the prior Administration's ONDCP' — meaning the objection is not to political management as such, but to the wrong politics.
The concrete reform is the reverse of what Project 2025 proposes: retain career oversight of budget and grant functions, subject grant awards to transparent, merit-based criteria reviewable by Congress and the relevant Inspectors General, and require public reporting on grant outcomes. Political appointees set policy direction; career professionals administer funds. Collapsing that distinction — as the source text explicitly demands — is how federal grant programs become patronage operations.
Original source — excerpted
project2025 Project 2025 ch. 4: Department of Defense (pp 95-96)"— 62 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise The National Drug Control Program agencies represented a total of $41 billion in fiscal year 2022. Whereas the position for overseeing budget activities is tradi - tionally held by a career official, it is imperative that a political appointee lead the ONDCP budget office to ensure coordination between the OMB Program Associate Director and the ONDCP budgetary appointee. ONDCP grant-making activities have been controversial over the years, par - ticularly within conservative Administrations concerned that the White House lacks the expertise to oversee such programs directly. The ONDCP administers two grant programs: the Drug-Free Communities Support Program and the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas Program. While it makes sense to transfer these programs eventually to the Department of Justice and Department of Health and Human Services, respectively, it is vital that the ONDCP Director ensure in the immediate term that these grant programs are funding the President’s drug control priorities and not woke nonprofits with leftist policy agendas. Thus, the President must insure that the ONDCP is managed by politi…"