Tom Temin Commentary

Project 2025 and your federal job: Better read up on this one

Project 2025 is not some mysterious force from nowhere. Check out the project web site to see who's behind it and their prescription for the federal workforce.

Tom Temin@tteminWFED

July 11, 2024 4:06 pm

4 min read

If you haven’t heard about Project 2025, you should check it out. The presidential candidates and their surrogates have been talking about it. For the Democrats, Project 2025 plan is evil incarnate. To Republicans, it’s a blueprint to make America great again.

The politics of it are a little complicated. Former President Trump has disassociated himself from Project 2025. Yet some of his peeps are part of it, such as former Office of Personnel Management chief of staff Paul Dans. Also former special assistant to Trump, Spencer Chretien.

In reality, Project 2025 is a production of the conservative Heritage Foundation. It presents a long detailed set of policies and priorities for the next administration. Its full title: “2025 Presidential Transition Project.” It resulted from the convening of a few hundred conservative thinkers and a long list of similarly-minded think tanks. Love it or hate it, it’s out there for anyone to peruse. Oddly, when I asked for one of the federal workforce Project 2025 people to join me for an interview on The Federal Drive, they told me Project 2025 would not be “available.” I thought you might like to hear one of the Project 2025 thinkers in his own words.

Project 2025 also exists as a book, “Mandate for Leadership,” you can buy or read online. I was interested in Chapter 3, entitled, “Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy.”

You might have heard Project 2025’s plan for the federal workforce. Some have described it as a way to gut the merit-based civil service system and return to 19th century spoils. Without judging it on the merits, I will say that’s an overly simplified view.

I decided to look for myself. Trigger warning: The plan calls for the restoration of Schedule F. That civil service innovation came near the end of the Trump administration, and was rescinded on Day 3 of the Biden administration.

Schedule F would have moved certain career senior executives out from under Title 5 civil service protections. Namely, those whom Title 5 itself exempts from protection: People in positions to make or advocate policy. Such career people in effect would have been treated similarly to Schedule C appointees. An administration could dispatch them at will.

The Project 2025 authors see Schedule F as related to something they say every administration tries to do. In “burrowing” people down into the Senior Executive Service, the political types think they can embed their policy preferences into the permanent bureaucracy. They say Presidents Carter and Reagan tried to limit burrowing in the early days of the Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA). Since then, “reserving accessible numbers of key policy positions as ‘career reserved’ … frustrate CSRA intent.” They cite “general domination by career staff on SES personnel evaluation boards” and “career-first policy and value viewpoints” as having frustrated the Trump administration, spurring Schedule F.

No one knows how many federal employees would have ended up in Schedule F. Agencies mostly didn’t finish the task of identifying them. The whole thing ran out of time. Project 2025 says, “It [Schedule F] should be reinstated, but SES responsibility should come first.”

Project 2025 also calls for reform of federal retirement benefits, but doesn’t specify how. But it states the Federal Employee Retirement System “remains much more generous” than what private sector employees receive on average.

It calls for moving from automatic, across-the-board pay increases and an end of what it calls (citing the Government Accountability Office) a fully successful or above evaluation for 99% of employees. It calls for reinstatement of Trump Executive Order 13839. Also rescinded by the Biden team, that EO shortened probation times and sped up the initiation of disciplinary actions.

EO 13839 “will need to be reintroduced in 2025,” the Project 2025 authors state.

There’s much more. A return to standard tests for federal employment, simplifying appeals through the Merit Systems Protection Board, and more rigorous performance appraisals coupled to pay raises. With respect to the MSPB, they state, “The real problem is the time and paperwork involved in the elaborate process that managers must undergo during appeals. This keeps even the best managers from bringing cases in all but the most egregious cases of poor performance or misconduct.”

It also calls for reinstatement of three Trump executive orders disliked by the federal employee unions and rescinded by the Biden White House. EOs 13836, 13837, and the afore-mentioned 13839 called for renegotiation of collective bargaining agreements, pulling back official time allowances, and limiting grievances and making performance a higher priority for retention than seniority.

In summary, here’s how the Project 2025 people see things:

“Today, the federal government’s bureaucracy cannot even meet its own civil service ideals. The merit criteria of ability, knowledge, and skills are no longer the basis for recruitment, selection, or advancement, while pay and benefits for comparable work are substantially above those in the private sector. Retention is not based primarily on performance, and for the most part, inadequate performance is not appraised, corrected, or punished.”

Whether Project 2025 is good or bad for federal employees is up to each person to decide. I do give the authors credit for understanding civil service and the value of an independent workforce. What they propose is controversial. But it’s not a scorched earth gambit. Many of their ideas have bounced around for years. So it’s worth reading if only to know what might happen after the 2024 elections.