Project 2025’s plan to gut civil service with mass firings: ‘It’s like the bad old days of King Henry VIII’

Trump’s ‘Agenda 47’ calls for issuing an ‘executive order restoring the president’s authority to fire rogue bureaucrats’. Photograph: Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Even as Donald Trump seeks to disavow Project 2025, he and the rightwing effort’s authors have voiced similarly hostile plans for the US’s 2 million-plus federal employees – to replace many of them with political appointees.

These plans are stirring alarm among federal employees, with many warning that “politicizing” the civil service will hurt not just them, but also millions of Americans across the US by undermining how well the US government provides services and enforces regulations that protect the public.