Project 2025's White House Councils: Centralizing Power, Sidelining Career Expertise

The source text describes a layered interagency process — Policy Coordinating Committees, Deputies Committees, and Principals Committees — that sounds procedurally neutral. But the tell is in the staffing logic: every seat at every table is reserved for 'political' appointees, from Assistant Secretary–level political staff at the PCC tier all the way up to Cabinet Secretaries and 'senior White House political staff' at the Principals Committee. Career civil servants — the scientists, economists, lawyers, and program managers who carry institutional memory across administrations — are structurally absent from the described process. That is not an oversight; it is the point.

The NSC section of Project 2025 — addressed separately from the White House council architecture excerpted here — makes the preference explicit: the document calls for limiting 'detailees,' career agency experts temporarily assigned to the NSC, in order to ensure more direct presidential control. Detailees are precisely the officials who bring operational knowledge of what agencies can legally and practically do. Reducing their role does not streamline governance; it insulates White House political staff from expertise that might complicate or slow ideologically preferred decisions. Alexander Hamilton argued in Federalist No. 70 that energy in the executive requires unity of purpose, but also what he described as due dependence on the people — a dependence that is undermined when the people's expert servants are locked out of the room.

The domestic and economic councils raise a related concern. The DPC and NEC are presented as instruments for ensuring that agencies execute 'the President's stated goals' — a legitimate coordination function. But when combined with Project 2025's broader agenda of Schedule F reclassification and loyalty-based hiring detailed elsewhere in the document, this council architecture becomes a transmission belt: political priorities flow down, and any career-staff friction in implementation is engineered away. Protect Democracy's authoritarian playbook research identifies exactly this pattern — cloaking the capture of the professional civil service in the language of efficiency and accountability while delegitimizing nonpartisan expertise as 'the deep state.'

A democratically accountable alternative would retain robust interagency coordination while codifying, rather than eroding, the role of career expertise. Congress could strengthen this by statute: requiring that career Senior Executive Service officials have a formal advisory role in Deputies and Principals Committee processes, codifying protections against Schedule F–style reclassification, and reinforcing Senate confirmation norms so that political appointees who sit at these tables face genuine legislative scrutiny. Coordination power concentrated in a White House that is simultaneously purging the career workforce is not efficient governance — it is the architecture of a captured state.