By Sherman Criner

The era of big city bosses calling the shots through cronyism and crooked dealing was thought to be a relic of the past. Names like Boss Tweed in New York and Tom Pendergast in Kansas City once epitomized the repressive system of political machines – where favors were traded, enemies crushed, and public interest took a back seat to the consolidation of ill-gotten power.

Thanks to sweeping civil service reforms ushered in by Progressive-era presidents like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, these corrupt political titans were supposedly excised from American politics for good. But could an insidious new threat be emerging to revive the scourge of “boss politics” on a national scale? An unlikely development within the modern conservative movement may be unintentionally laying the foundations for what could become a “Trump machine” – positioning a former president at the head of a new populist patronage network that threatens to undermine democratic norms. 

The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, colloquially known as Project 2025, is a program designed by the Heritage Foundation and over one hundred other conservative organizations that seeks to recruit young conservatives into the next Republican presidential administration. The Project plans to accomplish this through its four fundamental pillars: “a policy agenda, personnel, training, and a 180-day playbook,” which Heritage believes will ensure the success of the next Republican administration. According to its website, however, Heritage does not view the coming presidential transition, should it transpire, as a normal one. Project 2025’s goal is not just to “win elections” but to “rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left” by implanting people who will be ready “on day one of the next conservative administration” to carry out the president’s agenda. While this kind of revolutionary rhetoric is not a new development for conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation, this rapid assembling of a human capital pipeline centered around one politician certainly is unprecedented.  

Though the group does not openly pledge itself to any one Republican candidate and the Trump campaign had no involvement in the writing of Project 2025, the group’s director, Paul Dans, and associate director, Spencer Chretien, both served in the Trump White House, indicating that Project 2025 may be intended as a rallying point for a future Trump administration. Project 2025’s website boasts that the Trump administration readily accepted and converted into policy nearly two-thirds of the policy recommendations included in Heritage’s “Mandate for Leadership,” a conservative policy manual given to each conservative president since President Reagan, and the president of Heritage, Kevin D. Roberts, explicitly stated that the overarching goal of Project 2025 is to “institutionalize Trumpism.” Thus, this ostensibly neutral “Presidential Transition Project” seems to be nothing more than a thinly veiled recruitment and agenda-setting task force for former President Trump and his promises to remake the federal government in a second term in office.  

But is Donald Trump really trying to become the Tweed-like “boss” of the United States? There are two plausible answers to this question, each with drastically different ramifications for the future of America’s political establishment. The first, “pessimistic,” perspective contends that former President Trump is, in fact, attempting to exert authoritarian control over the United States by staffing the federal government with loyalists and rewarding them through a Tammany Hall-style patronage system. The second, “optimistic,” view holds that ideological allies of Trump, the dominant figure in the Republican Party, are simply attempting to strengthen a potential future Trump presidency by establishing a robust conservative talent pipeline. 

Before evaluating these contrasting perspectives, it is crucial to note that the potential risks and benefits associated with an initiative like Project 2025 must be considered in a nuanced and balanced manner. While concerns about potential abuses of power and threats to democratic norms should be taken seriously, it is also important to acknowledge the legitimate role that political organizations can play in shaping policy and recruiting talent aligned with their ideological leanings. Even so, Project 2025 has yet to prove whether it will perform these legitimate duties or serve instead as a spoils system for a “new conservatism” founded upon the former president’s cult of personality. According to many seemingly old guard Republican conservatives, Project 2025 is indicative of Trump’s fixation with personal vendettas, not conservatism. Trump’s former Vice President, Mike Pence, who warned about the “siren song of populism” in his brief presidential campaign, has recently said that he cannot “in good conscience” vote for Trump because he is pursuing an agenda that is “at odds with the conservative agenda.”  

There is a good deal of evidence for this concern held by committed conservatives outside the MAGA base, including statements made by former President Trump himself, such as his claim that Article II of the Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want” as president. To be fair, this notion of absolute presidential control over the executive branch has been the subject of many heated and highly publicized debates within conservative circles dating back to George W. Bush’s administration. Recently conservative legal theorists, like Harvard Law’s Adrian Vermeule, have reignited this debate by contending that the president does, in fact, possess sole constitutional authority over the executive branch’s staffing and operations. Additionally, Trump’s 2024 campaign rhetoric has raised alarms about his plans for the federal government. He has said he wants to be a “dictator” on his first day back in office, and there have been reports and concerns raised by critics that Trump may seek to “purge the civil service” of career bureaucrats and civil servants who do not embrace his agenda, potentially using the military as a “domestic police force” to achieve this goal. Project 2025 provides a detailed blueprint for how Trump can institutionalize many aspects of his agenda, including the use of Schedule F to remove career foreign service officers, for example, and replace them with political appointees. 

Alternatively, others optimistically believe that the former president and his conservative allies are merely trying to mirror the past efforts of activist progressive organizations by placing ideologically compatible young professionals in the federal bureaucracy. This perspective is bolstered by the fact that many left-leaning political organizations, such as the Brookings Institution, Center for American Progress, and American Constitution Society have engaged in similar efforts to shape the federal bureaucracy by offering policymaking guidance and recruiting personnel aligned with their respective agendas. From this view, Project 2025 is simply the Heritage Foundation’s response to the efforts made by these more progressive organizations to prepare their next generation of advocates for careers in the federal bureaucracy. In this view, Project 2025 appears to be a commonplace example of how Washington works, not an effort to stuff the federal bureaucracy with the former president’s “Revolutionary Guard.” 

Optimists also point out the historic gap between Trump’s rhetoric and the actual policies he is able to pursue within the constraints of presidential power. In 2016, Trump ran on the promise to build a wall at America’s southern border, a policy that was impossible at a comprehensive level without significant bureaucratic support. Of course, the former president fell far short of this goal; while in office, the Trump administration only managed to build 200 miles of the wall, partly because officials within the Department of Homeland Security pushed back against the policy. Similarly, the former president’s so-called “Muslim Travel Ban” faced similar bureaucratic pressures which narrowed the ban’s scope. To optimists, former President Trump’s inability to fully enact these policies serves as a reminder that the administrative state can and will stall agendas it deems harmful and would continue to do so even under the onslaught of four more years of Trump. Will the federal bureaucracy still possess this institutional capacity in a post-Project 2025 world? No one really knows. 

The most fatalistic of Project 2025 fears should also be tempered, if not expunged, by an appreciation for the fact that there are previous examples of conservative pipelines into the federal government which have not attempted to overhaul the system. In 1982, a handful of law students founded the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies to challenge the legal establishment by returning the U.S. judicial system to a time where attorneys and judges alike said: “What the law is, not what it should be.” This group, mainly consisting of conservative and libertarian law students, swept the campuses of law schools and has since become the most extensive networking and job placement channel within the conservative legal movement. Although sometimes described as a “radical” conservative group, the Federalist Society has historically acted within the accepted boundaries of constitutional law. Indeed, two individuals formerly involved with the Federalist Society, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, have often adopted a more institutionalist approach during their divisive tenure on the Supreme Court, in response to the sweeping ideological aims of some of their colleagues.  

Of course, is not to say that the Federalist Society and Project 2025 are the same kind of organization or possess similar missions. Instead, the Federalist Society example should illustrate how a pipeline of purportedly “radical” and “extreme” professionals into the federal government, such as Project 2025, can result in something other than a shift toward despotism. 

While maybe extreme in their own right, both pessimists and optimists fail to recognize that boss politics never truly disappeared from the American system. In reality,  the influence once garnered by individual politicians like Boss Tweed has been redirected into the broader political party infrastructure. America’s two largest political machines, the modern Democratic and Republican Parties, have become political “bosses” in their own right, implementing the tactics that once dominated the closed-door meetings at Tammany Hall.  

Certainly, the Democratic Party is not immune to allegations of machine politics, given its near-total party unity, a seeming reward system for loyalty to party leaders, and instances of cronyism. The Republican Party exhibits many of these same characteristics, but now, in the era of Trump, it seems that Republicans have finally found the “boss” who will lead them into their political promised land. In short, yesteryear’s boss politics are today’s political parties. More importantly, even though his own historical knowledge probably limits his ability to think in such terms, Donald Trump seems motivated to shake the status quo set by our two-party system and become something America has not witnessed in nearly a century: a national boss. 

In the face of these disheartening political developments, it is vital to be level-headed about the fearmongering and provide a clear-eyed view of Project 2025’s potential impact on America’s republican system. For those who fear that Project 2025 will enable former President Trump to unconstitutionally restructure the federal bureaucracy, ask yourself whether past American presidents have succeeded in implementing similar threats. Did President Franklin D. Roosevelt not threaten to remove Supreme Court justices and top bureaucrats who viewed his New Deal agenda as unconstitutional? Did President Clinton not “burrow” his political appointees into the federal bureaucracy by giving them career civil service positions? And for those who believe that Project 2025 is a harmless conservative recruitment engine, ask yourself if this initiative truly supports conservative values or the individual ambition of the former president. If it does, why have so many prominent conservatives (if not the majority, given Trump’s stranglehold on the party) spoken out against his plans for a second term? 

Regardless of which perspective one takes, one thing remains evident: Americans should be skeptical of political movements centered around people as opposed to ideas. Ideological conservatives who continue to support Donald Trump would do well to remember that Edmund Burke, the great conservative thinker, said that “institutions carry the collective wisdom of the ages.” Trump’s plan to attack the nonpartisan civil service could sap our government of much of this wisdom. And while Project 2025 is likely to function only as a recruitment tool, there is reasonable suspicion that President Trump is positioning to become a quasi-dictator, and although Project 2025 was not created by the Trump campaign, the former president’s own words remain the best evidence for its compatibility with his view of presidential power. Project 2025, at its worst, could provide a playbook for a kind of Trumpian dictatorship. The onus is on the former president’s allies to, as Walter Lippmann suggested, be “better men” by taking every measure to ensure Project 2025 does not fuel such a power grab, no matter how unlikely it may be.