Democrats, still smarting from the Trump administrations alliance with Elon Musk that effectively DOGE'd USAID and disrupted one of their favorite spending pipelines, are now quietly organizing to reverse those reforms and restore Washingtons swollen bureaucracy.
According to RedState, a cadre of former Biden administration officials is working behind the scenes to fix the way the Trump administration has disrupted how the government works, effectively crafting a progressive counteroffensive to the conservative policy vision laid out in the Heritage Foundations Project 2025. That conservative blueprint, a detailed policy agenda for a future Republican administration, was hysterically portrayed by Democrats during the 2024 campaign as a dystopian manifesto, with critics on the Left likening it to a modern-day Mein Kampf and warning that a second Trump term would use it as a manual to shrink the size of the Federal government.
The panic was palpable as Democrats insisted that such a reduction in federal power must be stopped at all costs, even as many voters welcomed the idea of a leaner, more accountable government. When the DOGE initiative moved to implement precisely those kinds of reformscutting bloat, trimming budgets, and challenging entrenched bureaucraciesDemocrats responded with theatrics that bordered on self-parody.
One memorable episode featured Rep. Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, accosting random federal employees outside the Department of Education, a scene that underscored how deeply the political class in Washington identifies with the bureaucracy it is supposed to oversee. That spectacle now serves as a prelude to the latest effort by former Biden officials to reassert control over the administrative state and roll back the DOGE-era changes.
A new initiative, Just Securitys Reinvention Blueprints, has emerged as the Lefts answer to Project 2025, with its authors openly focused on undoing DOGE cuts and, more ambitiously, expanding the reach and size of the federal government. Former Biden administration officials are contending with a new reality: Future administrations wont have a choice but to confront the way the Trump administration has disrupted how the government works, one report on the project explains, framing Trumps reforms not as a correction but as a problem to be solved.
The architects of this plan are a familiar roster of Washington insiders, the whos who of Swamp creatures who see every disruption of the status quo as a crisis rather than an opportunity for accountability. One of the key figures, K. Sabeel Rahman, made the intent explicit, saying of the plan, We have a lot of rebuilding to do. Our ambition shouldnt be just limited to gluing the broken pieces of the vase back together.
Their ambitions go far beyond restoration and into aggressive expansion of federal power. The papers propose a complete reorientation of the government so that its more responsive to presidential orders, emergencies and everyday work, with the centerpiece being a new Cabinet-level agency that brings together all federal administrative work under one roof, from HR to technology to financial management.
Alongside this proposed super-agency, the blueprints call for overhauling the pay structure for federal employees to better compete with the private sector and a campaign to rewrite the federal workforces collective bargaining rights. In practice, that means higher taxpayer-funded salaries, stronger public-sector unions, and fewer constraints on the permanent bureaucracy that already wields enormous influence over policy regardless of who wins elections.
This is a roadmap for people who want the government to work, said Tara Dawson McGuinness, a far-left activist and one of the authors, revealing the underlying assumption that working government is synonymous with bigger, richer, and more powerful government. For conservatives, that framing is precisely the problem: it treats the administrative state as an end in itself rather than a limited tool accountable to the people.
Democrats spent the 2024 election cycle demonizing Project 2025 as an authoritarian plot simply because conservatives dared to articulate a governing agenda that would reduce federal overreach and restore constitutional balance. Now, the same political faction is quietly assembling its own detailed playbook for the next Democrat administration, one that promises more bureaucrats, more federal power, more union clout, more spending, and an entirely new Cabinet-level agency to manage the growth.
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