Dismantling the Federal Civil Service: Project 2025's Schedule F Purge
Project 2025 calls for firing tens of thousands of career civil servants and replacing them with political loyalists, a plan that former President Trump disavowed on the trail but has been linked to executive actions. This undermines the Pendleton Act's merit principle, the Civil Service Reform Act, and inspector general independence, concentrating unaccountable power in the White House.
The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 foreword celebrates the Reagan-era Mandate for Leadership as a model, claiming more than 60 percent of its 1981 recommendations became policy. This historical reference is used to rally conservatives to a new, more radical agenda: 'dismantle the administrative state' and replace career civil servants with loyalists. The plan, detailed in Chapter 1 of the Mandate, is a detailed blueprint; as of January 2025, President Trump has enacted a Schedule F executive order (widely reported as EO 14170) that broadly aligns with those recommendations, reclassifying tens of thousands of career civil servants as at-will political appointees. This move, if implemented fully, would unbind them from merit protections established by the Pendleton Act of 1883, allowing wholesale replacement of experts in agencies like the EPA, Interior, and IRS with partisan loyalists and weakening enforcement of environmental, fiscal, and ethical rules. The Brennan Center for Justice calls this a 'truly radical proposal' that 'no president has ever sought.'
The humanitarian alternative
A democratically accountable approach would codify civil service protections in statute—prohibiting reclassification of career positions without explicit congressional authorization—and strengthen inspector general independence by requiring Senate confirmation of agency watchdogs and limiting their removal to cause defined by Congress. Congress should also restore funding for agency training and oversight functions that are targeted for elimination.
Rollback path — how this gets undone
This action has already been implemented. These are the concrete levers that could reverse it.
- Rescind Executive Order 14170 The next president must issue an executive order revoking EO 14170 and restoring the competitive service rules that existed before January 20, 2025.
- Codify civil service protections in the Civil Service Reform Act Congress must pass legislation that amends 5 U.S.C. § 7511 to prohibit reclassification of career positions as political appointments without explicit statutory authority, preventing any future Schedule F.
- Restore funding and authority for agency enforcement and oversight Congress must appropriate funds to rehire fired career staff, reinstate inspectors general removed without cause, and restore statutory mandates that were stripped by executive action.
Original source — excerpted
project2025 Project 2025 ch. 1: White House Office (pp 35-37)"— 2 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise and the country and led the United States to historic political, economic, and global victories. The Heritage Foundation is proud to have played a small but pivotal role in that story. It was in early 1979—amid stagflation, gas lines, and the Red Army’s inva - sion of Afghanistan, the nadir of Jimmy Carter’s days of malaise—that Heritage launched the Mandate for Leadership project. We brought together hundreds of conservative scholars and academics across the conservative movement. Together, this team created a 20-volume, 3,000-page governing handbook containing more than 2,000 conservative policies to reform the federal government and rescue the American people from Washington dysfunction. It was a promise from the conservative movement to the country—confident, specific, and clear. Mandate for Leadership was published in January 1981—the same month Ronald Reagan was sworn into his presidency. By the end of that year, more than 60 percent of its recommendations had become policy—and Reagan was on his way to ending stagflation, reviving American confidence and prosperity, and winning the Cold War. The bad news toda…"