Project 2025 Implementation: Executive Orders 21 - 25

As of today 92 executive orders have been signed. In the coming week I will be working on a plan and schedule to get caught up as soon as possible. I work full time and have a family and my own mental health to take care of. Still, this project is a high priority for me and I hope to be able to pick up the pace with more structure and routine-building.
These five orders cover a range of topics, all of which have concerning implications for millions of Americans.

EO#21: Clarifying the Military’s Role in Protecting the Territorial Integrity of the United States - This order directs the Secretary of Defense to deliver a plan to Trump for the military to seal the borders to maintain US sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity. It says the military should have a plan to seal the southern border by repelling migration, drug and human trafficking, and other criminal activity. 

• Page12 of Project 2025:  "Illegal immigration should be ended, not mitigated; the border sealed, not reprioritized." The connection between the EO and this sentence is undeniable.
  
  This EO characterizes our current situation at the southern border as an invasion. It's worth noting that the flow of migrants across the southern border has dropped significantly from its high point in 2023 and, even if it were rising, courts have ruled in the past that mass-migration events do not constitute an invasion. At any rate, the military has been used to supplement border patrol and help with logistics before but that's not how this is reading. Trump is authorizing a military campaign against people entering the country without documentation. This posturing compounds the growing tension between the US and Mexico, and sets a precedent for other uses of the military in domestic policy. 

EO#22: Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government - This order defines sex as a person’s “immutable biological classification as male or female”. It requires federal agencies to use the word sex instead of gender (which are not the same thing), reverses the previous policy which allowed people to apply a non-binary marker to their government issued ID, mandates who can use which bathrooms, calls for investigation and litigation to enforce a gender binary, and more.

• Page 4 - 5: "The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, [...] and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists."

• Page 332: it says that the new administration should rescind policies which added a new “nonbinary” sex category to the Civil Rights Data Collection

• Page 333: “define “sex” under Title IX to mean only biological sex recognized at birth." This order is an attack on trans people and their right to express themselves freely just like everyone else. It is a gross misrepresentation of biology, which demonstrates clearly that sex and gender are much more complicated than a two-category system. Intersex people exist, making up 1.7% of the US population. That comes out to almost 6 million people. And gender is a social construct completely separate from biological sex. This bill claims to protect women, but it actually harms both cis and trans women.

EO#23: Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid - This order freezes all federal foreign aid for 90 days to review whether they are aligned with the current administration’s policy positions. 9 days after it was signed, the secretary of state announced a waiver that would allow life-saving aid to resume but the threshold for defining what is life-saving remains unclear.

• Page 174: “Upon inauguration, the Secretary of State should order an immediate freeze on all efforts to implement unratified treaties and international agreements, allocation of resources, foreign assistance disbursements, domestic and international contracts and payments, hiring and recruiting decisions, etc., pending a political appointee-driven review to ensure that such efforts comport with the new Administration’s policies”
  Courts have ordered Trump to resume disbursement of all federal aid which Congress has appropriated. The executive branch does not have the authority to determine what funds allocated by Congress should be disbursed. The power of the purse would be meaningless if the executive branch had that power. Despite these court orders, most aid programs have not resumed. This is yet another example of Trump attempting to consolidate power. He doesn’t think he needs to pay any mind to Congress’s power of the purse, and he doesn’t think he needs to listen to the judges. These are core checks and balances being completely ignored, and so far we’ve seen no consequences for his abuses of power.

EO#24: Reforming the Federal Hiring Process and Restoring Merit to Government Service - This order instructs the Office of Management and Budget, the Office of Personnel Management, and DOGE to develop a federal hiring plan to prevent hiring based on race sex or religion, decrease the time it takes to hire new employees and improve communication with candidates. It also states that DOGE should make recommendations about HR practices in each agency, and that OPM should monitor progress of the stated reforms. 

• Page 570: “All hiring committees associated with hiring for career positions across the department should be assessed for impartiality to ensure that individuals are hired based on merit, aptitude, and legal skill and not based on association with or membership in certain ideologically aligned groups or based on illegal considerations such as race, religion, or sex.” This section is discussing the Department of Justice specifically, while this executive order is focused on federal personnel overall.
  This sounds like common sense, but its foundation is a fallacy. Trump and Project 2025 both assert that the implementation of DEI practices implies that unqualified workers will be chosen over qualified ones. But the whole point of DEI is to ensure that qualified candidates in minority groups are not overlooked at the benefit of lesser qualified candidates. The assumption that minorities in the workplace must be selected at the expense of better qualified white candidates is unfounded. DEI is a necessary initiative because we do not live in a post-racial society; racism can and does still taint much of the hiring process. DEI initiatives ensure that if a woman or person of color is qualified, they will not be overlooked for a lesser qualified white man, as was the norm for a very long time. Trump wants to pull us backwards on this. Merit is still the largest factor in hiring and women and people of color are capable of achieving a level of merit equal to or even better than their white male counterparts. Also, as a sidebar, it might be unwise to take HR recommendations from the man with a bunch of lawsuits from his treatment of Twitter employees.

EO#25: Restoring Accountability to Policy Influencing Positions within the Federal Workforce - This order is so pervasive and seems to have been the foundation for a lot of the indiscriminate federal firings we’ve seen thus far, a foundation Trump laid back in his first term. In Trump’s first term he created the Schedule F designation for apolitical federal workers which aren’t normally appointed, so they would normally have civil service job protections. Schedule F essentially made it easier to fire those employees. Biden had put limits on schedule F designation and how broadly it could be used. This executive order reinstates schedule F which allows Trump to fire federal workers he deems to be disloyal. 

• Page 80 talks about Trump’s initial implementation of Schedule F. Then it says “The order was subsequently reversed by President Biden at the demand of civil service associations and unions. It should be reinstated, but Senior Executive Service responsibility should come first.”
  This executive order makes it easier for Trump to fire people in apolitical jobs in the federal government. It opens federal employees up to retaliatory firings and firings without cause, which is exactly what we’ve been seeing for the last seven weeks or so. This is what fascist regimes do. They position themselves to fire anyone who disagrees with them, either to create instability within government operations or to install their own loyalists.