Project 2025 – The Department of State, Part 2

Throughout the chapter on the State Department, urgency to change the Department is repeated: all officials must be gone by the end of the day on January 20, 2025; steps to be implemented immediately, and so on. This is a large ambition. The State Department includes 13,000 Foreign Service employees and 11,000 Civil Service employees, who are the ones who would be affected, many of them fired, by the Project 2025 agenda.

Turning around an organization like this in a presidential term, never mind “by the end of the day,” is a big job requiring almost as many people as in the organization. It’s easy to send out pink slips, but then what? It’s possible that the Project 2025 agenda, to directly route presidential preferences into foreign policy, could be carried out with fewer employees. But that would also mean a very different relationship to the rest of the world.

Specifically, the report (starting on p. 174, 207 of the pdf) lists changes to be carried out immediately (italicized words are quotes from the report):

• Review Retroactively. Upon inauguration, the Secretary of State should order an immediate freeze on all efforts to implement unratified treaties and international agreements, allocation of resources, foreign assistance disbursements, domestic and international contracts and payments, hiring and recruiting decisions, etc., pending a political appointee-driven review to ensure that such efforts comport with the new Administration’s policies. All State Department business stops.
• Implement Repair. The State Department must change its handling of international agreements to restore constitutional governance. A part of the Republican Party has always held that treaties with other nations are unconstitutional. The argument is basically that because the Constitution holds treaties to be the law of the land, they must be ratified by Congress. But treaties also “give away” some US sovereignty: NATO, for example, inserts other countries into decisions on warmaking. And the US must not give away even the tiniest piece of sovereignty.
• Coordinate with Other Agencies. Interagency engagement in this new environment must be similarly adjusted to mirror presidential direction…The State Department’s role in these interagency discussions must reflect the President’s clear direction and disallow resources and tools to be used in any way that detracts from the presidentially directed mission.
• Coordinate with Congress. The Secretary of State and political leadership should ensure full coordination with the White House regarding congressional engagement on any State Department responsibility. This may lead to, for example, the President authorizing the State Department to engage with Members of Congress and relevant committees on certain issues (including statutorily designated congressional consultations), but to remain “radio silent” on volatile or designated issues on which the White House wants to be the primary or only voice. This is pretty standard in most cases, but in this context is part of assuring an iron grip on the State Department. There is a tone of concern here that Congress might not go along with the plan.
• Respond Vigorously to the Chinese Threat. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been “at war” with the U.S. for decades. Now that this reality has been accepted throughout the government, the State Department must be prepared to lead the U.S. diplomatic effort accordingly. The centralization of efforts in one place is critical to this end.
• Review Immigration and Domestic Security Requirements. Immigration is a big emphasis throughout the report. This section advocates using visa arrangements with other countries as levers to achieve goals in immigration and refugee acceptance. It also talks about bilateral agreements, which presumably would have been eliminated under earlier bullet points in this section. Not clear how that would work.

All of these issues reappear later in the report for fuller discussion. Specifics on countries come in the next section.

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner