What "Mandate for Leadership" Says About the GOP's Governing Philosophy

Replacing checks and balances with authoritarianism

Kyle Ellingson at the New York Times

In the absence of a party platform, the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership offers the closest thing to a blueprint for a second Trump term. In May of last year I wrote that it signaled a conservative movement committing to Trumpism. So, lets take a closer look at what the document tells us about how the Republican Party is embracing a reactionary governing philosophy.

Trump is going to be the nominee and the authoritarian threat he represents is real. But I think the media has a hard time discussing this topic. Matt Yglesias recently explained that he is unlikely to focus too much on anti-democratic risks before the election, partly because they are hard to communicate.

I think his return to power is genuinely dangerous. That said, I don’t think the future of democracy will be a major theme in our 2024 coverage. For starters, I don’t think there’s that much that’s journalistically interesting to say about it. He lost a fair election, pretends that didn’t happen, and tried to get the results illegally tossed out. What more can I say?

Yglesias also says he is worried about demoralizing people in the event of a Trump win. Nevertheless, this seems like a striking editorial choice. Yglesias is at least explicit about the challenge. He may be right that there are only so many ways to explain what the anti-democratic risks look like. But I do think there is a responsibility for journalists and people like me to make an effort to do so. If most of us agree that Trump threatens US democracy, but the media spends more time talking about Biden’s age, that seems like a collective failure to communicate the stakes of the next election.

One reason for not engaging with the story of Trump’s authoritarian tendencies is that it might seem like a static fact. He facilitated January 6, still denies election outcomes, and seems comfortable with misusing government powers. Once you have established those points, what more is there to say? This is also a problem for political communications in the Biden campaign: how to talk about democratic risks if the basic threat does provide new updates that feed a news cycle?

There are a couple of responses to this concern. One obvious one is that many people, mostly Republicans, don’t accept the basic point that Trump operated in an anti-democratic way. Perhaps they never will. But there are two more practical responses.

The first is that Trump’s policy agenda as he articulates it often rests on violating laws and norms. This is most obviously the case for hot button topics like immigration, and national security policies. But it holds in other areas. For example, Trump recently promised in Richmond, VA to block federal funding to any school with a mask or vaccine mandate. That seems like a big deal!

A federal policy that blocks basic public health policies in schools? Not just Covid vaccines, any vaccines? I struggled to find meaningful media coverage of this as a policy idea, though apparently Trump has been saying it for at least a year. Obviously, Trump is not talking about overturning elections here, but he is envisaging a model of governing that imposes policies that will make people less safe regardless of what states and localities want. Having some basic explainers at what the legal structure of such orders might look like, and what Trump would have to do to make such orders a reality seems like a basic journalistic task. Because all of this sounds illegal! The President cannot withhold Congressionally appropriated funds, something Trump seems not to have learned despite being impeached over exactly this issue. Is he talking about impounding funds here, which is a presidential power that he claims, but which is unconstitutional? The status quo, where Trump says crazy-sounding stuff, but reporters ignore it because his proposed actions would violate existing rules or norms, is not terribly useful if Trump has shown he is willing to violate those rules and norms. As a result, Trump talks about authoritarian strategies in public, but much of the time the implications for what this would mean for policies and government services are not spelled out. If Trump was treated as a candidate willing to use government power in unprecedented ways, I think we would be covering such policy pronouncements differently.

Second, we can do more to explain Trump’s likely framework for governing, why it is more likely to matter in a second term, and when it is likely to rely on anti-democratic practices. The idea that Trump II will be more competent, less constrained, and more comfortable with authoritarian actions is not a deeply embedded civic fact in American life. Which brings us back to Mandate for Leadership.

You could read this document in a couple of ways: as a policy blueprint or as a governing philosophy.

As a policy document, Mandate for Leadership is only moderately interesting. For example, in the domain of my research, administrative burdens in safety net programs, Mandate for Leadership argues for adding more burdens that make benefits harder to access. It calls for additional work requirements for both SNAP and Medicaid. This is despite the fact that we have strong evidence that work requirements don’t work. More such burdens in Medicaid, in particular, will be disastrous. But the ideas are not new. Trump signed an executive order calling for work requirements in social programs in his first term, and his Department of Health and Human Services encouraged states to add Medicaid work requirements.

As a statement of a governing philosophy, Mandate for Leadership is very interesting. It offers an insight into what elite Republicans accept as appropriate norms and practices for governing. This is no small thing, since an ethos for governing is not dependent on a specific policy or time, and once embedded, might be slow to displace. It is also a victory for Trump, since Mandate for Leadership is all in on Trump’s governing philosophy, to the point that they are seeking to recruit, through the aligned Project 2025, 20,000 new foot soldiers. They know that the traditional Republican base of appointees does not match with what is needed, and instead need an “an army of aligned, vetted, trained and prepared conservatives” to implement an unprecedented takeover of government.

When his term ended, Alasdair Roberts and I offered a catalogue of the qualities that defined Trumpism as an governing philosophy. This included a divisive populism that presented state actors part of a corrupt elite, a delegitimization of public service values and public employees, a preference for political and personal loyalty over competence, a blurring of personal, political and Presidential powers and interest, and a deep aversion to traditional modes of presidential accountability.

This formulation holds up pretty well, I think, though I’d add that conspiracism and anti-democratic ethos as features that deserve to be more prominently featured. By aligning itself with Trump (and being run by former Trump officials), Mandate for Leadership has signaled a willingness to go along with Trump‘s anti-democratic tendencies. Indeed, the leader of Heritage refuses to accept that Biden won the election.

The Biden campaign seems to be embracing the strategy of talking about Mandate for Leadership and its associated Project 2025, as vehicles to explain the radicalism and democratic threats that Trump poses. I don’t know if this will work, but it seems like a useful political heuristic to convey that a second Trump will be both more radical and more competent than the first.

Others have written on this topic. Thomas Zimmer provides an excellent two-part piece. Parker Molloy has written how it will hurt LGBTQ people. And Carlos Lozada of the New York Times took on the herculean task of reading the entire 887 page document to discern recurring themes. I am mostly going to summarize and quote Lozada’s work here, since it further illuminates the contemporary GOP blueprint for governing.

Science and Evidence Cannot Contradict the Party

The idea that Republican officials have been a tad skeptical about science and research is hardly news. Trump even banished a US Department of Agriculture research unit to Kansas City, causing many scientists to quit. He sidelined scientists. Many of his rulemaking processes faltered because his appointees neglected to follow requirements to include scientific evidence in their reasoning.

Still, it is remarkable to be so open about targeting agencies for producing research. Mandate for Leadership says that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration should be “broken up and downsized” because it is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”

The “climate change industry”? See, there are some industries that Republicans want to put out of business!

The risks of climate change or credible government response are not accepted in Mandate for Leadership. Indeed, the word “climate” cannot be uttered without an some language to emphasize that its all exaggerated, e.g., “climate extremism,” “radical climate policy,” “extreme climate policies,” or “climate policy fanaticism.” Climate is also presented as akin to DEI or Critical Race Theory “and other woke ideas”— artifacts of liberal brainwashing, where efforts to solve some underlying societal problem is a much greater danger than the problem itself.

Across agencies, Lozada observes a strategy of politicizing science with the goal of producing pre-determined outcomes.

At the E.P.A., for example, the document calls for a new science adviser and at least six new appointees charged with reforming the agency’s scientific research; qualifications for those roles should stress managerial skills rather than “personal scientific output. Throughout the book, descriptions of new research agendas are often paired with the explicit findings that such research should yield, whether on the mental and physical damage that abortion inflicts on women or the pernicious impact of taxes and regulations on minority-owned businesses. Later, tucked into a discussion of the National Institute of Standards and Technology at the Commerce Department — yes, the weeds are tall and scratchy here — the document urges a new administration to ensure that “any research conducted with taxpayer dollars serves the national interest in a concrete way in line with conservative principles.” It’s an effective sleight of hand: politicizing government-funded scientific research by tying the national interest to conservative priorities.

Elsewhere, the report calls for “a biblically based, social-science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.” See, its possible to marry science and religion, as long as research reinforces religion! Actually, this particular section wants to ensure that taxpayer dollars “should be available to faithbased recipients who affirm that marriage is between not just any two adults, but one man and one unrelated woman.” (Lot going on here, but are there federal grant recipients advocating for marriage between related men and women?) In other words, refusing to recognize gay marriage should not be a barrier to receiving federal funds.

Much of what government does is to collect data to allow scientific analysis. These decisions on who and what gets counted matter in directing attention to people and problems. Mandate for Leadership would restrict the gathering of certain data (on gender identity, racial or gender employment outcomes), but calls for collecting new data in other areas: the number of abortions.

Governing via Ideological Purges

Mandate for Leadership is chock-a-block with culture cliches. “Woke” is mentioned 35 times, “critical race theory” 23 times and “transgender” 13 times. “DEI” beats them all, mentioned 39 times.

The repeated message is that that your federal government is awash with these radical ideas! Most people don’t interact with the agencies or bureaucrats that are being described. So they lack an ability to assess these claims with first hand knowledge. But surely, most people would strain to believe that the US Army faces “a pervasive politically driven top-down focus on progressive social policies that emphasize matters like so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion and climate change, often to the detriment of the Army’s core warfighting mission.” Similarly, it feels like a stretch to believe that “Marxist indoctrination” is a feature of military instruction.

At the moment, red state governments are firing employees who worked on DEI programs. Mandate for Leadership would take it up a notch. Within discussion of the Department of the Treasury, it calls for treating “participation in any critical race theory or DEI initiative, without objecting on constitutional or moral grounds, as per se grounds for termination of employment.”

It is not enough to end efforts to facilitate diversity, equity and inclusion. Anyone who participated in them in the past shall be exposed and fired. This is a red scare mentality, directed toward government’s own efforts to (largely symbolically) address historical inequalities. As Lozada put it: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the D.E.I. party?”

The idea of purging the ideologically suspect is not limited to those who might have participated in DEI. It extends to career civil servants as an entire class. Mandate for Leadership enshrines the Schedule F strategy of allowing career civil servants to be fired at the will of a President into the GOP playbook. This strategy ignores that these employees are recruited on the basis of merit, that they are charged with upholding the law and the statutory mission of agencies as written and overseen by Congress.

We also are learning more about how deeply Schedule F could extend within the government. The strategy is incredibly vague about how many employees it covers. There is no numerical limit. Anyone with a policymaking or policy advisory role can be included. This could be easily extended to almost anyone doing white collar work, or even street level bureaucrats serving the public. Before he left office, Russ Vought, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget chief and Mandate for Leadership co-author, tried to convert nine out of ten OMBs officials into fireable appointees. New reporting reveals how deeply this reclassification extended, including "office managers, human resource specialists, administrative assistants, cybersecurity specialists." This implies the frequently used 50,000 number for Schedule F reclassifications (up from 4,000 appointees currently) is probably a floor rather than a ceiling, which will ultimately be determined by a highly politicized leadership that might want to clean house.

Law Enforcement Not Permitted to Threaten the President

Trump, like many would-be authoritarians, understands that he needs not just to control the bureaucracy broadly, but the national security apparatus in particular. Such control protects him from prosecution (no small concern given his legal troubles), and allows him to use state power to target his political enemies.

Trump and his appointees object to the idea that the Department of Justice should have enough independence to credibly investigate him. Mandate for Leadership also rebuts the idea of DOJ independence: “While the supervision of litigation is a DOJ responsibility, the department falls under the direct supervision and control of the President of the United States as a component of the executive branch.” Failure to follow the President’s agenda should result in disciplinary action. And if the President’s agenda is to protect the President from the consequences of his crimes, or use the DOJ to spearhead his efforts to overturn an election, so be it. Lest there be any doubt, the report adds that “the Office of White House Counsel must therefore work collaboratively within the White House and the Department of Justice, relying on each other as a team.“

A “vast expansion” of political appointees are needed within the DOJ given that “large swaths of the department have been captured by an unaccountable bureaucratic managerial class and radical Left ideologues.” Ah yes, the radical Left ideologues of Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice. Or the wild-eyed leftists of Christopher Wray’s FBI.

A Legal Apparatus to Green Light Presidential Misdeeds

Trump has made clear that a big lesson from his first term was not relying on sufficiently creative and loyal lawyers. In a second term, Trump will empower lawyers who will make the law accountable to him, rather than ensuring he is accountable to the law. This means a particular focus on General Counsels, who green light what is and is not permissible, enabling action well before the courts know what is going on. Mandate for Leadership codifies this change into Republican policy. As Lozada notes:

What happens when the agenda and the law conflict? The answer is implicit throughout Mandate for Leadership. At the Department of Homeland Security, for example, the general counsel should hire more political appointees to supervise the office’s career lawyers, because “the legal function cannot be allowed to thwart the administration’s agenda by providing stilted or erroneous legal positions.” The law must submit to the president’s priorities. If not, the lawyers are doing it wrong.

Declaring inconvenient laws inapplicable is another option. For example, when the secretary of homeland security decides that “an actual or anticipated mass migration of aliens” headed to the United States “presents urgent circumstances,” the secretary may issue whatever rules and regulations are deemed necessary, for as long as necessary, “including through the expulsion of such aliens,” with a final proviso that “such rule and regulation making shall not be subject to the requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act.” Read the act, and you’ll see that it governs the process by which agency rules are exposed to public comment and are subject to review by the courts. That lone sentence, tacked on at the end of a paragraph on Page 152 of “Mandate for Leadership,” is a bureaucratic invitation to legal impunity.

The last point reflects the sense that another Trump administration would strategically seek excuses to expand its authority, to declare an emergency when it suits it, and use that emergency power to do whatever it wants. Stephen Miller was finally able to implement his vision of a closed border by invoking the health crisis of the pandemic. But he had tried to do the same prior to the pandemic, suggesting that minor outbreak of illnesses was enough to justify draconian uses of executive power. Get ready for Trump lawyers to use similarly routine events — think protests that end in violence — as a means to justify extraordinary powers.

Weakening Other Branches

Partisan polarization rules everything, but at what point do other branches start to realize that Mandate for Leadership and Trump’s unitary executive vision comes at their expense? Staying with the Department of Justice, Lozada notes a claim that “the foundation of the separation of powers” is, paradoxically, that the executive branch is tasked with the roles of other branches.

In a section titled “Affirming the Separation of Powers,” the book contends that the executive branch — that is, the president and his team at the Justice Department — is just as empowered as any other branch of government to “assess constitutionality.” A new conservative administration must “embrace the Constitution and understand the obligation of the executive branch to use its independent resources and authorities to restrain the excesses of both the legislative and judicial branches.” The president must make sure that the leaders of the Justice Department share this view of the separation of powers.

Some more bad news for Congress. Again from Lozada:

Congress’s powers of oversight, for instance, would diminish in various ways. Rather than endure the process of congressional confirmation for people taking on key positions in the executive branch, the new administration should just place those officials in acting roles, which would allow them to begin pursuing the president’s agenda “while still honoring the confirmation requirement.” (That is, if bypassing the requirement is a form of honor.) Lawmakers would no longer review U.S. foreign arms sales, the book states, except when “unanimous congressional support is guaranteed,” a requirement that renders those reviews pointless. The Department of Homeland Security should have the power to select and limit its congressional oversight committees. And the White House can tell the State Department when to remain “radio silent” in the face of congressional inquiries.

A Disdain for the US System of Government

What is most striking with Mandate for Leadership is the deep disdain it holds for the US model of government, for checks and balances, and for democracy. The President, if he is a Republican, must be empowered to not just implement the law, but also determine the law, and then to suspend the law when he deems fit. The people at Heritage drew up this blueprint for a man who sought to overthrow American democracy, and has consistently made plain his refusal to accept democratic outcomes. The “every accusation is a confession” claim is overused, but when it comes to the weaponization of government, it really does fit here. Recall that those involved in Trumpworld, most clearly Russ Vought, pushed the weaponized government trope precisely as a justification to take control of the bureaucracy in the way that Mandate for Leadership lays out.

This is not a model of governing for an empowered President; it is a roadmap for an authoritarian to perform an administrative coup. As Lozada wryly concludes:

At one point, in a chapter on the Commerce Department, a former Trump administration official offers some italicized advice: “When authoritarian governments explain what they plan to do, believe them unless hard evidence demonstrates otherwise.” He is discussing Russia and China, though the warning could apply more broadly.