As 2025 is wrapping up, I wanted to look back at a document that has had a pretty big impact on how our government has worked this year. That document is the Mandate for Leadership, also called “Project 2025.” The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, put it together. Right before the last election, a lot of people said this would be the Republican administration’s playbook. Trump said he was not going to follow it, but now in his second term, it has become clear that a lot of Project 2025’s ideas are actually happening, just like people expected.
For this post, I am focusing on just one piece. I want to talk about how the administration is handling the federal workforce, especially now that we are in a government shutdown. In the past, the government would go with furloughs and workers would eventually get back pay when things started up again. Now, we are seeing a move toward layoffs instead. It makes sense to connect this shift to Project 2025, which calls for a major overhaul of the federal workforce. The Trump team is following that plan to turn temporary problems into permanent cuts, and cost savings is the reason they give.
This is a big change from how shutdowns have usually been dealt with. Before, furloughs were temporary but at least workers still had their jobs. With Project 2025 as a background influence, the administration is using the shutdown as a chance to make long-term changes. The focus now is not just to save money for a little while but to actually shrink the federal workforce for good.
Project 2025 is all about giving more control to the executive branch and streamlining agencies. Power is shifting away from career civil servants and toward appointees chosen by the president. The document lays out ways to cut departments, merge agencies, and reduce the number of federal employees, by as much as 75 percent if you take its language literally. It also says it should be easier to fire people, stop appeals, reorganize, and even close entire agencies, all in the name of efficiency. But at the same time, this puts more power at the top.
Project 2025 does not actually say to use a shutdown to make mass layoffs, but it creates the groundwork so that something like this is much more likely to happen. With the administration moving fast and with support from loyal appointees and the Supreme Court, these policies are moving from ideas to reality. Agencies are shrinking, some are being closed or combined, and the presidency is gaining new ways to make changes, sometimes at the expense of job protections.
So as the shutdown goes on, it is a reminder that documents like Project 2025 are not just policy talk. They actually affect real people who keep the government running. Some people call this efficiency, but to a lot of folks it just looks like a permanent power grab. What all of this will mean for government and for us is something we’ll still be figuring out long after Congress and the news have moved on.