[Salon] Project 2025 and the Purge of American Diplomacy: The Blitzkrieg Against State



The Steady State 
Thu, Oct 9, 2025 at 12:58 PM





Project 2025 and the Purge of American Diplomacy: The Blitzkrieg Against State

The Steady State | by Jonathan M. Winer 

October 9, 2025



 








 


The Playbook
Over the past eight months, the U.S. Foreign Service has faced a fundamental transformation. In 2025, the Trump administration adopted and operationalized the personnel overhaul blueprint laid out in Project 2025 to dismantle the non-partisan, professional core of the State Department and to replace it with a cadre of political loyalists beholden to executive will, not constitutional duty. This was not reform, but a political blitzkrieg aimed at capturing what was seen by Donald Trump and his team as enemy territory in need of occupation.

We all should have been on notice last year, when Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership” chapter on the Department of State insisted that “no one in a leadership position on the morning of January 20 should hold that position at the end of the day,” and described “left-wing bureaucrats” as incompatible with the President’s agenda. The chapter called for sweeping reallocation of authority, freezes on discretionary spending, and widespread use of acting officials to bypass Senate confirmation. These were not abstract proposals; they were the playbook for a wholesale political takeover of diplomacy. The logic was coherent in its ambition: purge first, then repopulate with ideologues who would execute a narrower, politicized posture abroad going forward.

Day One: Loyalty Over Law
On January 20, 2025, the administration issued an executive order restoring and renaming the discredited Schedule F, now recast as “Schedule Policy/Career,” and targeted positions that determined, formulated, or advocated policy. The order directed the Office of Personnel Management to rescind or override prior civil-service protections, and created a new ground for removal: failure to “faithfully implement administration policies.” In practice, this meant political loyalty became the condition of continued employment. The State Department leadership quickly instituted loyalty screenings, coupled with informal vetting lists of “desirables” and “undesirables.” Some asked for ideological questionnaires or even personal affirmations of alignment with administration priorities.

The Purge in Practice
By mid-2025, the purge was underway. The administration moved to terminate more than 1,350 U.S.-based employees—supplemented by voluntary departures amounting to approximately 3,000 total. Among the targets were civil-service and foreign-service officers whose portfolios touched on democracy, rights, civil-military affairs, and international accountability. Simultaneously, offices specializing in human rights, war-crimes monitoring, and civilian security were downgraded, merged, or eliminated altogether - often with minimal notice or consultation. In practice, the strategy stripped space for dissent, pressured survivors to self-censor, and constricted the institutional memory anchoring U.S. diplomacy. The purges, justified in part by litigation and Supreme Court clearances, mapped onto the Project 2025 direction to destabilize and reconstitute from the top down.

Symbols and Signals
Beyond personnel moves, the administration imposed symbolic but telling constraints. Countering multilateral initiatives, the government rescinded support or funding for several U.N. bodies, accelerated withdrawals from key international agencies, and commanded reviews or pauses on U.S. foreign aid lines. These steps reaffirmed that power now flowed unidirectionally: from the executive’s political center outward, not from specialized expertise upward. For career diplomats who had long relied on principled continuity through law, norms, and institutional guardrails, these moves sent a signal that only political alignment mattered.

The Warning to Diplomats
In September, it was reported that the administration had warned U.S. diplomats of retaliation should they provide honest, off-script assessments. That fit the model: loyalty was enforced not only by purges, but by the chilling warning that the alternative to fealty would be banishment.

The Pattern of Capture
This pattern has followed the Project 2025 agenda with precision. That agenda prescribed a day-one purge of leadership and urged freezes and reviews of allocations, which the administration implemented through Schedule Policy/Career and suspensions of aid. Project 2025 encouraged the widespread use of acting appointments, and the administration replaced career heads with acting loyalists. It called for elimination of so-called “woke” or DEI functions, and the administration wiped out anyone who had ever been connected to “diversity,” “equity” or “inclusion.” It advocated centralization and the removal of independent agencies, and the administration rapidly absorbed development units into State, invading and shuttering institutions like the National Endowment for Democracy, the Wilson Center, the U.S. Institute for Peace, and USAID.

The Firewall Breached
The civil-service system had long been built on merit, free _expression_, and protection from partisan tests. This firewall ensured that estimates, dissent, and continuity outlasted political tides. When the new regime reclassified policy roles as at-will, demanded ideological loyalty, and systematically purged contrary voices, it severed that firewall. That invited grave dangers: chilling dissent, causing institutional memory loss, privileging compliance over candor, and testing the limits of statute, civil-service protections, and constitutional constraints. Those who resisted were forced into costly litigation, often before a Supreme Court whose partisan majority repeatedly proved willing to give Trump what he wanted.

What Is Being Lost
As a former State Department official, I had long seen how a professional core of foreign service and civil service officers provided the United States an enduring capacity to promote and advocate for American interests around the world. What was now being lost was not just jobs but a culture built over generations of service to Republican and Democratic Presidents alike. It was a service tradition in which foreign policy was informed by overseas experience, analysis, engagement, and a restraint derived from institutional gravitas to ground our policies and actions in knowledge rather than whim. That tradition was the very essence of steady state governance.

Hollowing Out
Now, with diplomacy being run out of the White House—special envoys drawn from the President’s business and family circle, career diplomats forced out—the State Department seemed to lose the capacity to resist short-term impulse, to counsel caution, to say no when necessary, and to build coalition-based legitimacy. Few will speak truth to power when job security depends, regardless of merit, on saying “Jawohl.”

Each day, honorable and talented men and women at State and other national security agencies continued to be purged, or to exercise self-help by fleeing. It will take decades to recover from their loss.

Jonathan M. Winer is the former Special Envoy for Libya and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Law Enforcement and a Distinguished Diplomatic Fellow at MEI. He is a member of The Steady State.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonpartisan, nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 300 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.




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