In the second Trump Administration, it seems every day brings a new horror: the military occupies U.S. cities; the regime takes aim at its opponents while destroying the critical government functions we need to serve the common good; the president and his aides alike engage in corruption on a historic scale; they threaten free and fair elections.
It is easy to get caught up in the immediate response: mobilizing to defend those individuals and institutions targeted by Donald Trump and his minions; fighting his actions in Congress and the courts; and organizing for the 2026 midterms to impose some sort of political check on Trump’s actions.
This is all essential work. If we can’t resist Trump now, and throw his regime out of power in the 2026 and 2028 elections, our democracy and our people will continue to suffer enormous damage and destruction.
But we need to prepare for the day after. Someday—hopefully soon—forces that care about democracy and effective governance will win back power. And when we do, we will have an incredibly difficult job ahead of us.
Trump has destroyed entire agencies, most notably the U.S. Agency for International Development. And he has effectively destroyed many others, including the Department of Education (where, with the blessing of the Trump-aligned Supreme Court, he has acted to fire more than a third of the staff, and has sought to close down the department entirely), and the Department of Health and Human Services (where he has pushed out more than 20,000 workers, or about a quarter of the staff). Indeed, again with the blessing of the Supreme Court, he has directed massive layoffs across the executive branch.
But the problem is much more profound than it seems. At the Department of Justice, he has driven out the most experienced career attorneys, and he has effectively depopulated key offices like the Federal Programs Branch (which defends the government when it is sued). He has fired the leaders of independent agencies like the National Labor Relations Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and many others for not being aligned with his own policy preferences. Across the government, he has sought to politicize the hiring of career civil servants, he has driven out highly qualified and effective experts who have served across administrations, and he has installed highly ideological, unqualified hacks in positions of great responsibility. He has also hobbled the agencies that Congress created as independent watchdogs to protect against the politicization of the civil service, notably the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Office of Special Counsel.
It’s worse even than what he’s done to the internal workings of government. Research institutions and private businesses have relied for decades on federal grants to promote knowledge and innovations and to bring the fruits of those innovations to market. Trump’s administration has, on its own say-so, effectively shut down many of those grant programs. The entire United States infrastructure of knowledge creation, built up painstakingly since World War II, is on the brink of collapse due to Trump’s actions.
When, we can all hope, the forces of good return to power, undoing this damage will be an enormous task. We will need to be truly ready on day one—not just to stop the Trump regime’s destruction of government, and not just to issue flashy executive orders that will lead to results only some months down the line, if ever. We will need to begin on day one to implement a domestic Marshall Plan for the U.S. government. We need to rebuild the institutions of government–to restore what worked, but not to be limited by the past structure of those institutions. The Trump administration has wreaked so much havoc that there is likely no going back to precisely how things were. We have a crying need for–and an opportunity to construct–a stronger, more resilient government that democratically serves the public good.
Doing this requires a plan, and the plan has to be developed right now. I wrote this article because I’m concerned nascent rebuilding efforts are too sanguine or defeatist about the depths and permanence of the damage Trump is inflicting.
MAKE-WORK PROJECT 2029
We have a model: Project 2025. After losing the 2020 elections, the Trump coalition worked hard to prepare a plan of action to fundamentally reshape American government and democracy when they took back power. Trump tried unpersuasively to disavow Project 2025 during his campaign. On taking office, however, his administration undertook a blitzkrieg through the agencies to implement major portions of that plan. Less than seven months into the administration, a leading tracker concluded that “Project 2025’s roadmap for dismantling American government is 47 percent complete.”
We need to be equally prepared with a plan, and move at least as quickly to implement the plan, as Trump’s team was with Project 2025. To a degree, the anti-Trump coalition seems to get it.
Among the political leaders, interest groups, and aligned intellectuals that make up that coalition, there are already many efforts in place to craft some sort of Project 2029. Some of these efforts have received press attention; others are flying under the radar for now. These multiple efforts are being undertaken by folks affiliated with various parts of the anti-Trump coalition. As you’d expect, they have not coalesced around a single set of policies to emphasize.
And at this point, that’s fine. In our system, when a party is out of power, its different factions need to fight it out amongst themselves to work through what the party’s policy approach will be in the next presidential election. Among Democrats in the George W. Bush years, these fights led to broad agreement on a health-care plan that took the form of the Affordable Care Act; among Democrats in the first Trump administration, these fights led to an increased focus on labor and fair trade, and broad agreement on a bill for drug-price negotiation under Medicare.
The anti-Trump coalition still has time to work out what policies it wants to implement should it take power in the 2028 election. For any version of Project 2029 to be successful, however, it will have to do more than articulate policies. It will have to confront the brute fact that Trump has already destroyed vast swaths of the machinery of governance—a situation that is likely only to get worse by 2029, even if the Democrats sweep the midterms. And if the Republicans lose power, we should fully expect them to sabotage everything they can on the way out the door.
If Democrats take back power in 2029, then, the transition will be entirely unlike anything we’ve seen before. In the past, a party entering government would spend the transition working on how to implement new programs through, and perhaps make incremental changes to, existing institutions.
That was true even in the completely dysfunctional 2021 transition, when the outgoing administration refused to cooperate while it contested the election, culminating in the January 6 insurrection—and when the ongoing COVID pandemic would have made even an amicable transfer of power extremely difficult. I was a day-one appointee in the Biden administration. And while we obviously made major changes from the first Trump administration, our focus was on how we could quickly reverse its harmful programs and, using the existing institutions of government, adopt new ones that served the agenda we believed the American people had just voted for.
In a 2029 transition, though, the institutions of government necessary to implement a new agenda in many cases simply won’t exist. Any Project 2029 will need an answer to these questions: How do we rebuild a structure for effective governance? How do we do it quickly, while also ensuring that the new structure is resilient to future Trump-like attacks? How much of the pre-2025 status quo should we be trying to restore? How much should we be focusing on building new, or substantially revamped, institutions? And how do we rebuild a robust, expert, nonpartisan civil service in the face of the inevitable bad-faith charges that it is the Democrats who are politicizing hiring by eliminating Trump-installed hacks?
READY TO BUREAUC
Some of the incipient Project 2029 efforts seem to be confronting these questions. Others aren't so much: They're just focusing on what the next incremental policy steps should be, as if it were 2017 and we were coming up with the bones of Medicare drug-price negotiation, or 2006 and we were coming up with the bones of the Affordable Care Act.
I'm very worried that not enough folks are working on the hard institution-building questions, or that they're addressing those questions only in the most shallow ways. They’re trying to figure out how to fill existing civil-service slots with dispatch, and correlatively how to ensure that Trumpies who have filled those slots through an illegitimately politicized process can be quickly removed. But they’re largely assuming we’ll just be filling out the government structure that Trump is turning over to us, or at most that we’ll be returning to the structure that existed before Trump arrived.
Unfortunately, I don’t think the government is ever going to look the way it did before Trump’s second term. The damage he’s done is too pervasive. The agency closures, the mass firings, and the capricious shutdown of federal support for innovation, among other things, will leave in place only a shell of the government we had before—and will make it hard to recruit expert civil servants and outside partners who now know that they are one bad election result away from losing their jobs and their sources of financing. Those who are crafting a 2029 agenda will need the imagination to create new structures that can promote effective governance and promise resilience, independence, and stability to those we’re enticing to join the rebuilding project. If those new structures can avoid some of the policy pathologies of pre-Trump programs, all the better.
And we must guard against another effect of the Trump-era hollowing out of the civil service. Once all of Trump's cuts to agency staff are finalized, Washington insiders will treat those cuts as the new normal. Even just returning to the 2024 level of government staff (which already was threadbare) will look to them like a huge budget increase—and you can fully expect Republicans, amplified by both right-wing outlets and the mainstream media, to attack Democratic restaffing proposals as a massive increase in spending.
The experience of recent decades gives us little reason to expect that congressional Democrats will stick to robust re-staffing proposals in the face of these attacks. Except for the DC-area senators and members of Congress who represent many federal workers, congressional Democrats largely shy away from standing for government employees. Relying on polling, they believe that government workers are simply not that popular with voters. They prefer to fight along other, more electorally appealing lines. Even now, as Trump is firing tens of thousands of federal workers across the country, Democrats in Congress are much more likely to highlight the cancer research Trump is cutting than the government jobs lost by many of their constituents.
That is understandable. Democrats need to win the midterms, and defending civil servants may not be the most effective midterm argument. Should the Democrats retake power, though, we need to be prepared to invest much more in the federal workforce, so that we can build a government that actually works for the people. That means reversing the Trump firings. It also means going beyond them: Hiring more federal workers in areas where there were already significant shortages prior to Trump, such as air-traffic control and public health; deprivatizing functions that have become boondoggles for private entities, such as Medicare prescription-drug coverage; and taking on new government functions that require additional staff, such as regulation of artificial intelligence.
Now is the time to lay the groundwork for this massive investment in the federal workforce. Over the next few years, as we coalesce around our own “Project 2029,” the anti-Trump coalition will doubtless have many healthy debates about what policies should be included. But we must also keep a focus on rebuilding the institutions of governance. And that must include a significant expansion of the federal workforce. If the Democrats play by the ordinary rules of budget politics, and they cower in the face of “big spender” attacks, they will freeze in place the illegal, illegitimate, and devastating Trump purge of the civil service. We must be preparing our coalition now to move boldly and quickly to rebuild.
 | A guest post by
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Thanks for this, Sam. I'm involved in some of these forward-looking efforts and I can't think of a significant discussion that hasn't started off by (explicitly) assuming we will not have the people, structures, and processes available to make things work, and that having a plan for that out of the gate is first priority. To that end, for example, there are numerous "institutional knowledge" projects underway to capture what has been and is being lost--knowledge yes, but also context for that knowledge like the laws, regs, bodies, institutions, unwritten actions--to inform reconstruction. I think / hope this does not lead to mere rebuilding of what existed before, because that would be wildly insufficient.
The biggest challenge that I see for this, though, is that in order to know which people to put where to do what task, we need to understand the desired outcome first. If we don't do that, I think there's a huge risk of gravitating back to the way things were on 19 Jan 2025. So I feel like it means both the conceptual desired policy outcome and the specifics of the money, actions, protections, etc. that government provides to people to make their lives better. We need that sketched out, and soon, because among other things, prepping for 2029 means getting things together for HR1 et seq. of the 120th Congress...can't be waiting around for the 121st Congress, which will mean resources and direction aren't available on day 1.
The last thing I'll note is going back to the "Thanks" at the beginning. A challenge I'm seeing and dealing with regularly--which everyone here probably recognizes--is that this administration and governance stuff is boring. We need support--moral / popular support, financial support, comms / marketing support--to do this boring stuff. So thanks for highlighting why it's important, hope it helps people understand and build that support.
>> That means reversing the Trump firings. It also means going beyond them: Hiring more federal workers in areas where there were already significant shortages prior to Trump, such as air-traffic control and public health; deprivatizing functions that have become boondoggles for private entities, such as Medicare prescription-drug coverage; and taking on new government functions that require additional staff, such as regulation of artificial intelligence.
Sam, I mean this in perfectly good faith, but I feel like this is still not really breaking free of the very paradigm you criticize!
Trump got away with so much of this because, yes, the public does in fact hate government workers — or at least THINKS it does.
A big hiring binge will also be hard to get off the ground if we just reinstate the previous everything-bagel approach to hiring.
I think a more realistic plan means taking some of the tools Trump has created, and doing more to improve government by slashing crappy policies where they exist.
For instance, the self-evaluation based system that Pahlka wrote about… needs to GO. Likewise, let’s do our own “The DOGE You Actually Wanted And Expected From That Orange Thug”: An office tasked with radically improving efficiency, and highlighting to the executive branch which outdated regulations or some stupid misinterpreted EO (like the one that created Pahlka’s hideous hiring morass) needs to go. Make Mark Cuban the czar of it, and empower him to go on the shows and podcasts every week with a big roundup of regulations that annoyed him that week.
The point is, what you just wrote here in the section I quoted — and I want to be gentle — smacks of everything that normies HATE about us PMC types. So let’s not do that. Kudos for the effort, and I agreed with most of the rest of this, but just wanted to offer some constructive criticism.