Project 2025 Envisions Eliminating Civil Service Protection for Thousands

Legal Planet: Environmental Law and Policy 2024-10-21

UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy, & Environment (CLEE) is sponsoring a series of papers evaluating aspects of Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation publication, entitled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,”  which has received attention in the Presidential election campaign.

CLEE published excerpts from the 922 page Project 2025 document related to climate change and environment, here.

The first paper in our Monograph series focuses on aspects of Project 2025 is: “Project 2025 Envisions Eliminating Civil Service Protections for Thousands of Highly Experienced and Knowledgeable Career Civil Servants,” available here.

Robert Uram, the Paper’s author, is an environmental and natural resource lawyer with more than fifty years of experience working with federal agencies, as a government attorney in the Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations, as the head of the agency in the Department of the Interior that regulates coal mining reclamation, and in private practice.

As the Paper states:

The Heritage Foundation’s Schedule F proposal would change the current system dramatically. Schedule F will reach well into agency middle management and impact many experienced and knowledgeable career civil servants with management, science, technical and other specialized expertise. . . .  [F]ull implementation will likely result in ten-fold increase in political hires. Tens of thousands of the most experienced career civil servants could be moved to less secure positions and then fired. Political loyalists would take their place. This transition poses both legal and logistical challenges.

We encourage everyone to read the full Paper.