Let’s begin with just what to call this part of the Project 2025 Report (hereafter the Report) of the Heritage Foundation, a well-known conservative think tank.  The Report calls it “The Executive Office of the President of the United States.”  Simon Pierce has written a critique of the Report, called Project 2025: A Mandate for Authoritarian Leadership.  In his critique, he calls this section,  “Expansion of Presidential Powers.”  As you see, I have called it “American Government.”  My reasoning is very straightforward.  The Report sees the President as the American Government.

You might miss some reference to other familiar institutions such as the Congress and the Supreme Court.  The Report criticizes these institutions, but only as asides.  In this section, as I will show, the government is the President and the job of the President is to serve the People.  (Caps in both cases are deliberate.)

I will be taking quotations from Pierce.  He says that the Report says such and such on page 43 and I take him at his word.  The few times I went to the Report to check for myself, he was correct, so I stopped checking.

Here is what the Report says on page 43 in the section Pierce titles Expansion of Presidential Powers.”

“The President must set and enforce a plan for the executive branch.  Sadly, however, the President today assumes office to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences—or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly “woke” faction of the country.  The modern conservative President’s task is to limit, control, and direct the executive branch on behalf of the American people.”  (I have put the last sentence in bold font because Pierce put it in bold font.)

The error in this section is so large and so grievous that it is hard not to be drawn away into what means might be employed to put it into practice.  The error is that there are two actors in American government.  There are the People (capital P) and the President.  The People may or may not have preferences.  The Report doesn’t say.  They are, rather, the recipients of the actions taken by the President “on their behalf.”

The preferences of the American people are famously diverse. Like every citizenry everywhere, they want lots of government services and low taxes.  Ordinarily, debates take place within the presumed framework of the Constitution and one set of policy preferences is traded off against another.  

That is not the problem as the Report sees it so we would expect that the solutions they propose will be in line with the way they see the problem.  The problems they identify are “a sprawling federal bureaucracy” which is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences or, possibly the policy plans and preferences of a radical, “woke” faction of the country.

There are two kinds of difficulties here.  The first is that the bureaucracy has its own plans, presumably plans that will benefit the patrons of whichever bureau proposed them.  The second is that even if the bureaucracy is being guided by the people, the people they are being guided by are the wrong people.  Those people are “a faction,” they are radical, and they are “woke.”  The bureaucracy should, therefore, not be guided by them.

At this point, the casual reader desperately misses any reference to the Congress, the body to which the Constitution gives the task of enacting those policy plans and preferences and, by the way, of funding them as well.  The President has the job of enforcing the laws the Congress passes and even if, as is often alleged, the Congress simply passes the legislation the “sprawling federal bureaucracy” asks them to pass, still, the point where changes need to be made is with the Congress, not with the bureaus.

But if American government is, as in the quote above, made up of the President, then Congress need not be consulted.  The President understands what will benefit the American people and is free to act on their behalf.  “On their behalf,” it goes without saying, as the President sees things.

What could possibly go wrong?