Donald Moynihan: Project 2025’s Threat to Democracy | SPECIAL EPISODE

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Project 2025 is a transition plan for a second Trump administration created by the Heritage Foundation, along with other conservative organizations. Heritage has created similar documents for presidential transitions every four years since 1980. One aspect of Project 2025, which is distinct from these previous iterations, is a focus on personnel policy. Near the end of the first Trump administration, the White House issued an executive order establishing a new classification of federal bureaucrats, Schedule F. The intent was to allow the president to exercise more control over career civil servants by exempting them from civil service protections and making it easier for the president to fire them. Project 2025 seeks to take advantage of Schedule F by creating a list of vetted conservatives who can replace, or credibly threaten to replace, employees who previously would have been considered non-political. This would likely have negative effects both on the quality and efficiency of government services, and on democratic accountability.

Donald Moynihan is a public policy professor at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and codirects the Better Government Lab at Georgetown University. He previously served as the McCourt Chair for Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy and as director of University of Wisconsin-Madison’s La Follette School. His work focuses on the administrative burdens citizens encounter during interactions with government. In addition to his research, Moynihan is the president of Association for Public Policy and Management.

Show links:
https://donmoynihan.substack.com/

The Context is a podcast from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, about the history, trends, and ideas shaping democracy in the United States and around the world. Every episode, host Alex Lovit, a senior program officer and historian with the foundation, interviews someone who has seen it all—scholars, politicians, journalists, and public servants. We’ll get their take on how we got to where we are, and what they’ve seen through their experience, not only watching the news unfold, but sometimes even being the news itself.

In these conversations, we’ll talk about things like inclusive democracy, citizen engagement, government accountability, and the threat of authoritarianism. Every question has its reason, and every answer has its context.

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