It's not even just about the fact that it's going to wreck those agencies, it also means that there will be substantially less whistle-blowing, and there will be virtually no one working for the government who will raise an alarm or put a stop to anything. When everybody is on board, that creates a substantial amount of power for the executive branch.

What makes it so frightening is that the discussion starts to slide away from the actual functioning of our democratic system and the workings of the executive branch, and starts getting into matters of where power is derived from in a government.

What we have seen is that our Congress is infected by too many friends of fascism, if not fascist themselves. Unless the Democrats have a supermajority in both chambers, Republicans can successfully derail every single thing Congress ever tries to do to reign in an executive branch that's out of control. Trump was impeached twice, and painfully, obviously guilty both times, and nothing happened because the system has been so fundamentally broken.

Knowing now that Congress can do nothing to stop him, and of course knowing that the court system is captured at this point, Trump will be completely and utterly unafraid of doing anything. The systems in place that would protect us from a renegade executive office will fail to stop him.

Having the entire executive, and every seat in every department filled with loyalists, with nothing in his way that can effectively stop it, is basically a precursor to dictatorship.

Honestly the best summary I’ve read so far and I actually downloaded the PDF 😬

Pretty much this.

Also, say what you will about NY Times, but they had a pretty good summary of this dismantling farily recently, and its implications.

Thanks for this. I had read up on it some time ago, and it seemed like par-for-the-course "paint the government our color once we're in power" except for a couple concerning points, so when people around here were talking about it like it was literal fascism, I dismissed that as misunderstandings and exaggeration. I hadn't realized that civil servants were hitherto untouched by the government switching colors.

So it sounds like it's not literal fascism, but it's more like... how in some fantasy worlds, higher powers will avoid getting involved in mortal affairs because doing so will give their enemies license to do the same and then the world becomes a mess. It sounds like if Project 2025 happens, then blue's going to retaliate in kind when they get power back (because otherwise they're at a major disadvantage,) and it keeps going, majorly hampering the government's operations. Who wants to get a job that you're gonna be fired from in 4 years? There's a chance that blue's just going to try to hit the undo button, but if red keeps knocking the block tower over and blue keeps rebuilding it, that's still not going to go very well.

But at the same time... they've already stated their willingness to do this. So the damage to the unwritten contract between parties is already done, and the only way to avoid the consequences is to keep blue in power until red redacts, and hope blue doesn't decide to do it first (which they probably won't, unless they say something like "the only way to defend against red doing it is to make sure they don't have their own people in there when they get the power.")

I don't like that, though. Sure, blue is generally more reasonable than red, but that's because they have to be in order to secure votes from reasonable people. If all they need to be is more reasonable than the guys who are literally planning to destroy the government, that's going to let them get away with some pretty undesirable things. I think a better move would be to try to address the deteriorating two-party dynamics we have. My money's on Literally Anybody Else.

Well, hopefully since they're trying to apply this first to the RNC they will run an incompetent campaign and lose.