If you have ever listened to former president Donald Trump speak at a rally or have seen a news report on him, you have probably heard him talk about something called the “Deep State,” and how he’s going to destroy it. What Trump and other Republicans refer to when talking about this is a conspiracy theory that the Administrative State, the section of the Executive Branch that has non-elected officials and career government workers that run different departments, is secretly controlling government policy. 

This is a claim that Trump has used over and over to attempt to destroy the credibility of the Administrative State. But why? Well, to put it simply, government officials stepped in multiple times over the span of the Trump Administration to stop orders that would have been illegal or against the interest of the United States. And, to the surprise of no one, Trump didn’t like his power being checked. 

So in October of 2020, right before the election, Trump issued an executive order that included a plan known as “Schedule F.” What Schedule F does is exempt government workers “of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character” from protections that prevented presidents from firing them based on loyalty to a party/ideology. In other words, the plan was to fire thousands of government workers that weren’t loyal to the Trump Administration and replace them with puppets. About 50,000 of them. 

Of course, the mass firing of civil servants needed to operate the many departments of the Executive Branch so everything runs smoothly and efficiently did not happen as Biden won the 2020 presidential election the next month and took office in January of 2021, and repealed Schedule F. 

But the threat of Schedule F and its devastating effects are not gone yet. Project 2025, the plan by the think tank called the Heritage Foundation to change America under the next conservative administration, has promised to revive Schedule F. 

So in a nutshell, if Donald Trump were to be reelected in November, the pathway to taking control of the federal government to implement all of the Republican policies would be to replace the Administrative State with Trump loyalists who will do the bidding of Trump, whether an order is Constitutional or not. It is the catalyst that, along with the Republican controlled Supreme Court, allows the rest of Project 2025 to truck along to irreversibly damage America in ways not even thought possible just 8 years ago.