News and Notes: Make America Facist Again
By George Francis Kane
Project 2025 is an ambitious plan to transform the government of the United States — and then the nation itself — into an instrument of conservative dominion, to be launched upon the election of a Republican president in 2024. The germinal concept underlying the plan is that the great obstacle that has thwarted conservative presidents thus far is the bureaucracy of career government workers operating powerful regulatory agencies. Project 2025 plans to undermine this opposition by implementing unitary executive theory, which holds that every agency of the executive branch of government is constitutionally under the direct authority and control of the president. This idea surfaced repeatedly during the administration of George W. Bush in the tidal wave of signing statements that he attached to new laws.
To implement an operational takeover, Project 2025 proposes the wholesale replacement of
government personnel. Less than a month before the 2020 election, President Trump issued the Schedule F Executive Order, which changed the employment status of thousands of civil service employees from competitive to at-will. This order states that “the President and his appointees must rely on men and women in the Federal service employed in positions of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character. Faithful execution of the law requires that the President have appropriate management oversight regarding this select cadre of professionals.” President Biden rescinded this executive order early in his presidency, but Project 2025 calls for immediately reinstating it. This will open about fifty thousand federal agency jobs to executive appointments. Project 2025 is already compiling a personnel database for this, providing application forms designed to identify the strongest and most doctrinaire MAGA loyalists.
At first glance, this is not the sort of political question on which Minnesota Atheists would take a position. Our political identity arises from the religion clauses of the First Amendment, and civil service job protections seem remote to this narrow interest. Atheists, however, should be very afraid of Project 2025.
From the years of the Earl Warren Court, Republicans spoke of their plan to seize ideological control of what then seemed to be a hopelessly liberal Supreme Court. That quest appeared to be commonplace political planning, but now that the plan has reached fruition, we can see that it has transformed the Free Exercise Clause into an inexhaustible font of religious privilege, and the Establishment Clause into vacuous prattle.
The 2025 presidential transition plan calls for the immediate takeover of every federal agency with an army of “weaponized conservatives ready on day one to do battle against the deep state.” The Christian nationalist precepts that the Supreme Court has implemented will be applied with passion by these agencies.
For example, the religionist hope for the Department of Education is to channel federal subsidies to the states away from public education and into church schools. The Supreme Court has ruled that if the state provides vouchers for private schools, then church schools cannot be excluded from the program.
Social Service agencies will try whenever possible to hand their functions over to Christian charities. Project 2025 calls for the Department of Health and Human Services to adopt a “biblically based” definition of “marriage and family.” Family-based policies will include eliminating abortion and outlawing “pornography,” which will be interpreted to include any mention of GLBTQ rights.
Even the Justice Department may promote Christianity. For example, the Bureau of Prisons could approve Christian programs for inmates, while denying them access to anti-religious materials.
The grasp of Project 2025 is too great for any single organization, so it has enlisted the support of well-funded conservative groups with impressive track records in culture wars. The Heritage Foundation, the Alliance Defending Freedom, the American Family Association, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the Family Re- search Council are among over 70 organizations on its advisory board.
The conservative reconstitution of the Supreme Court has been a disaster for the separation of state and church. Project 2025 may now topple Jefferson’s Wall for generations.