# Project 2025 and the Administrative State A receipt trail for the long campaign to dismantle the federal administrative state — and the people who staff it. The arc runs from an abstract anti-government slogan to a concrete operational plan: first shrink government as a matter of fiscal doctrine, then build the outside machinery to rewrite its rules, then seize the executive branch and deliberately demoralize the civil servants who run it. What begins as ideology ends as a personnel program. ## The doctrine — shrink it (2001) - [[Grover Norquist - drown it in the bathtub]] — 2001. The foundational [[Starve the Beast]] slogan: reduce government "to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." The aim stated as structural, not budgetary. ## The outside machinery — rewrite the rules (2024) - [[Lisa Nelson - laboratories of democracy]] — 2024. The head of [[ALEC]] frames the states as the proving ground for model legislation — the parallel, state-level track of the same project to reengineer what government does from outside the formal lawmaking process. ## The operational plan — seize and traumatize (2023–2024) - [[Russell Vought - put them in trauma]] — 2023. The [[Project 2025]] architect and OMB director states the goal of [[Schedule F]] plainly: make career civil servants "the villains," demoralize them, "put them in trauma" so they don't want to come to work. - [[Kevin Roberts - bloodless if the left allows it]] — 2024. The president of the [[Heritage Foundation]], Project 2025's parent, frames the whole effort as a "second [[American Revolution]]" — peaceful only conditionally. ## Analytical throughline The four quotes show the same project at four levels of resolution. Norquist supplies the *why* (government should be small enough to drown), Nelson supplies one *how* (model legislation pushed through pliable state legislatures), Vought supplies the operational *how* at the federal level (reclassify and traumatize the workforce via Schedule F), and Roberts supplies the *frame* that binds it into a revolutionary mission. The progression is the tell: anti-government conservatism did not stay an abstraction about budgets — it matured into a detailed, named, personnel-level plan to hollow out the executive branch and replace its staff. The "deconstruction of the administrative state" is not a metaphor in these receipts; it is a workforce strategy.