I continue to appreciate the US political analysis of by James B. Greenberg, a “political ecologist.” Such people don’t just report WHAT is happening; they explain WHY such things are happening and for how long. I have not altered Greenberg’s text in any way but have added emphasis in bold. I have also provided links to the organizations he names. While tiresome I agree, it is important to be aware of those who (in Greenberg’s words) work constantly “in the shadows.”
The true democratic disassembly takes place behind closed doors, with little fanfare, but devastating potential consequences. His Substack title kinda says it all: “How the push for an Article V convention could lock in the most radical parts of the right-wing agenda—permanently.”
Blog post by James B. Greenberg — Aug 14, 2025
The Heritage Foundation is not just drafting white papers. It has already produced a fully developed blueprint for governing—Project 2025, completed and published in April 2023—and is now working to see it implemented. Alongside Koch-aligned outfits, the Bradley Foundation, DonorsTrust, the Mercer family, and a constellation of state-level think tanks in the State Policy Network, Heritage is advancing an agenda that could alter the U.S. Constitution itself [1].
Two projects are moving in tandem: Project 2025, a detailed plan for consolidating executive power now guiding actions in Trump’s second term, and an Article V Convention of States, a rarely invoked constitutional mechanism that allows state legislatures to propose sweeping amendments without going through Congress. Both are funded by the same network and both are being advanced—quietly but deliberately [1][2].
The machinery is a closed loop. The donors fund the agenda. They pay for the marketing campaigns that frame it as “restoring liberty” or “protecting states’ rights.” They bankroll the lobbying efforts that push legislatures to pass resolutions calling for a convention. They also underwrite the legal and policy staff who draft the model legislation that those legislators introduce [3].
What they have built functions as a parallel polity—an unelected, unaccountable apparatus embedded inside the official government. It uses the laws, budgets, and offices of the state, but its loyalties run to private funders rather than the public. Once such a system takes root, it can outlast elections, sidestep oversight, and operate with a speed and discipline that formal democratic processes rarely match.
This same network is laying the groundwork for an unprecedented federal personnel purge through the revival of Schedule F. First introduced late in Trump’s first term, Schedule F would strip tens of thousands of civil servants of their job protections, clearing the way for political loyalists to take their place. Heritage and its allies have already compiled databases of vetted candidates, ready to move into key agencies [4]. Without this bureaucratic backbone, Project 2025’s policy blueprints would remain aspirational. With it, they are positioned to be implemented across the entire federal bureaucracy [1][4].
This is not representative democracy. It is governance outsourced to private actors who are not elected, not bound by obligations to the public, and not required to reveal their actual interests.
From a political ecology perspective, it mirrors the logic of resource extraction: public institutions are treated as a commons to be stripped of their value, repurposed for private gain, and left weakened for everyone else. The same extractive mindset that clear-cuts forests or privatizes water is now applied to the machinery of governance itself. Their reach is national, but their operations are granular, targeting county commissions, school boards, and statehouses with the precision of political campaign targeting.
The Heritage Foundation’s public face is policy research. Its real power lies in a coordinated political infrastructure. The State Policy Network, for example, links more than 50 state-based think tanks that act as delivery systems for the national agenda [3]. Each one produces studies, testifies in hearings, and mobilizes activists to create the appearance of grassroots momentum. This is the cultural work of legitimacy: the performance of democratic process—hearings, petitions, and votes—crafted to disguise the fact that the outcomes are prearranged and the scripts are written elsewhere. As in other systems of dominance, legitimacy is constructed through symbols and ritual, not by consent freely given.
At the same time, the American Accountability Foundation, a dark-money nonprofit tied to this network, is compiling “watchlists” of federal employees it deems ideologically suspect. These lists, circulated to political allies, aim to remove or sideline targeted staff. It is a quiet form of institutional intimidation, shaping policy by making government employees fear for their jobs [5]. This is how systems of power enforce loyalty: not only through visible laws or decrees, but through the invisible discipline of fear.
The Article V push is not just about fiscal restraint or term limits. Once convened, nothing in the Constitution limits what can be changed: Voting rights, separation of powers, civil liberties, and federal authority over everything—from environmental protections to labor law—could be rewritten. For those already holding economic and political power, it is a high-reward gamble. For everyone else, a high-risk proposition with few safeguards [2][3].
The media’s near-silence is part of the story. These groups thrive in the shadows. The quieter the path, the less public attention, the easier it becomes to present outcomes as inevitable, even consensual. By the time the public notices, resolutions have passed, delegates chosen, and the framework for change already in place.
This is the architecture of a quiet revolution. It is not a coup with tanks in the street. It is a carefully engineered redirection of power through existing legal channels, financed by those who benefit most when public authority is privatized. It is happening now, in plain sight, and almost no one is watching.
Endnotes
[1] Project 2025, Heritage Foundation, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (2023); “Project 2025,” Wikipedia, updated April 2025; Trump Is Bringing Project 2025’s Anti-Climate Action Goals to Life, Time, March 2025.
[2] “Convention of States,” Wikipedia, updated 2025; “Article V Convention of States Movement,” Center for Media and Democracy, 2024.
[3] “State Policy Network: The Right’s Think Tank Empire,” Center for Media and Democracy, 2024; “State Policy Network,” Wikipedia, updated 2025.
[4] “Trump Revives Schedule F, Opening Door to Federal Worker Purge,” The Guardian, April 18, 2025; “Schedule F Classification,” Wikipedia, updated 2025; AP News coverage, April 2025.
[5] “Pro-Trump Group Wages Campaign to Purge ‘Subversive’ Federal Workers,” Reuters, August 7, 2025; “American Accountability Foundation,” Wikipedia, updated 2025.
Achille Mbembe. Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.
Arturo Escobar. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Eric R. Wolf. Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Ferguson, James. The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
“Project 2025, Explained.” ACLU. 2025. https://www.aclu.org/project-2025-explained.
“Pro-Trump Group Wages Campaign to Purge ‘Subversive’ Federal Workers.” Reuters. August 7, 2025. https://www.reuters.com/investigations/pro-trump-group-wages-campaign-purge-subversive-federal-workers-2025-08-07/.
“State Policy Network: The Right’s Think Tank Empire.” Center for Media and Democracy. 2024. https://www.exposedbycmd.org/state-policy-network.
“Trump Is Bringing Project 2025’s Anti-Climate Action Goals to Life.” Time. 2025. https://time.com/7271567/trump-project-2025-anti-climate-action/.
“Trump Revives Schedule F, Opening Door to Federal Worker Purge.” The Guardian. April 18, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/18/trump-federal-workers-schedule-f.
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