Project 2025 Foreword: Anti-Expert Populism as Cover for Dismantling Merit-Based Civil Service
Pages 43–44 of Project 2025's Chapter 2 (rendered here as the Foreword) deploy a sustained rhetorical attack on 'elites,' 'expertise,' and 'managerial' government. While framed as a defense of democratic self-governance, the argument functionally delegitimizes the neutral, merit-based civil service established by the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 and codified in the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. By equating professional expertise with anti-democratic 'Wilsonian hubris,' the text prepares the ideological ground for Schedule F reclassification, mass replacement of career officials with political loyalists, and subordination of agency scientists, inspectors general, and enforcement staff to presidential will — all of which weaken, not strengthen, democratic accountability.
The passage presents a false binary: either the president controls every federal employee, or unelected elites rule America. This erases the actual constitutional design. Congress — not the president alone — creates agencies, appropriates funds, and sets personnel rules (Article I, Sections 1 and 9; Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer). The merit civil service exists precisely because the spoils system it replaced produced corruption and incompetence that harmed ordinary citizens most. Specific statutory and constitutional safeguards this rhetoric targets include: (1) The Pendleton Act / Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 — which established that federal employment turns on merit and fitness, not political loyalty. Calling career experts 'managerial elites' who circumvent 'the people' is a pretext for Schedule F, which would reclassify tens of thousands of career positions as at-will, stripping them of merit protections and enabling ideological purges. The people who lose are the public health scientists, safety inspectors, environmental enforcement officers, and financial regulators whose expertise protects ordinary Americans. (2) Inspector General independence — the passage's contempt for 'insulated' professionals echoes the justification used to remove multiple IGs without the 30-day congressional notice required under the Inspector General Act of 1978. IGs are not elites protecting themselves; they are the auditors who catch waste, fraud, and abuse that harms working-class constituents. (3) Whistleblower protections under the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 — career officials who report wrongdoing are reframed here as disloyal obstructionists rather than legal actors exercising statutory rights. (4) Senate confirmation norms — the 'managerial elite' framing supports bypassing Senate-confirmed appointments in favor of acting officials or direct Schedule F hires, circumventing the Appointments Clause (Article II, Section 2). Levitsky and Ziblatt document in How Democracies Die that a consistent early move of backsliding governments is to delegitimize neutral institutions — courts, civil services, press — as captured by enemies of 'the real people,' before replacing them with loyalists. This foreword follows that template precisely. The democratically accountable alternative is not a loyalty-based civil service; it is a strengthened one: Congress should codify Schedule F protections into statute, restore the 30-day IG removal notice requirement with teeth, strengthen the Whistleblower Protection Act's anti-retaliation provisions, and require Senate confirmation for a broader range of senior agency positions. Better management and clearer statutory mandates — not ideological purges — are the constitutional path to a more responsive bureaucracy.
Original source — excerpted
project2025 Project 2025 ch. 2: Executive Office of the President (pp 43-44)"— 10 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise To most Americans, this is common sense. But in Washington, D.C. and other centers of Leftist power like the media and the academy, this statement of basic civics is branded hate speech. Progressive elites speak in lofty terms of openness, progress, expertise, cooperation, and globalization. But too often, these terms are just rhetorical Trojan horses concealing their true intention—stripping “we the people” of our constitutional authority over our country’s future. America’s corporate and political elites do not believe in the ideals to which our nation is dedicated—self-governance, the rule of law, and ordered liberty. They certainly do not trust the American people, and they disdain the Constitution’s restrictions on their ambitions. Instead, they believe in a kind of 21st century Wilsonian order in which the “enlightened,” highly educated managerial elite runs things rather than the humble, patriotic working families who make up the majority of what the elites contemp - tuously call “fly-over country.” This Wilsonian hubris has spread like a cancer through many of America’s larg- est corporations, its public in…"