But it is likely that a lot of Project 2025, also known as “Mandate for leadership,” will materialize in Trump’s second term. After all, the very heart of the document — the common thread that ties it all together — is the goal of ridding the nation of the conspiratorial “deep state” that Trump claimed was obstructing him and his movement. For Trump, Making America Great Again requires deconstructing the administrative state as we know it. Project 2025 is a manifesto for non-governance that has become the operative philosophy of the Republican Party.

It is a step-by-step prescription for the radical modification and degradation of the mechanisms of government. It’s a plan to fire the professional and knowledgeable civil servants who make the business of designing, implementing, and enforcing every law and program, from long-term goals set by Congress and the president to responding to natural disasters and military emergencies.

Project 2025 explains how the cleanup will work. By eliminating civil service protections for government workers and eliminating competitive hiring based on merit. By identifying, recruiting and training those involved in this radical vision to occupy government agencies and departments. With specialist knowledge. Replace the opportunity of ordinary procedures. Eliminate entire departments and agencies, including the Department of Education, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Environmental Protection Agency. The federal bureaucracy, as it has been built since the 1930s, is slated to be dismantled.

Project 2025 is not a plan imposed on Trump by right-wing intellectuals. It is the fullest and most detailed expression of his own “deep state” conspiracy. The delegitimization of expertise and the destruction of standard procedures were defining marks of Trump’s first term.

It might have sounded believable when Trump distanced himself from Project 2025 because he simply cannot bear to have even his own goals codified, turned into a program. Because any schedule, even his, would compel him. When asked during the campaign whether he thought the Justice Department should dismantle Google as a monopoly, Trump could only answer personally: “They’re very mean to me. Very, very bad for me. I can speak from that point of view.” The questioner replied, “You would separate them, in other words.” What the interviewer failed to see is that Trump cannot speak from the “point of view” of policy. It cannot assess whether Google’s monopoly is problematic for the country, only whether it is good or bad for it.

Trump does not want to authorize the plans. He wants to empower a person.

And yet, whatever his disapproval, the disabling of government capacity at the heart of Project 2025 will be accomplished under a new Trump presidency. Civil servants will be fired and loyalists will be installed in their place. Trump will try to turn the Justice Department into a personal law firm tasked with investigating and prosecuting his enemies. The Department of Defense will become, as Trump said in his first term, “my generals.” Proponents of Project 2025, including JD Vance and Steven Miller, will zealously populate departments with people ideologically committed to deconstruction. Trump will accept, so long, that is, because he believes their loyalty is not to the program, but to him.

Russell Muirhead is Professor of Democracy and Politics at Dartmouth College. He also serves in the New Hampshire House of Representatives. Nancy L. Rosenblum is Professor Emeritus of Ethics in Government at Harvard. They are the authors of Ungoverning: The Politics of Chaos and the Attack on the Administrative State.