Democrats spent the entire 2024 presidential campaign telling Americans that Project 2025 was a modern-day authoritarian manifesto — a secret conservative plot to shrink government that must be stopped at all costs. Now a group of former Biden officials has quietly assembled their own version: a detailed governing playbook called Just Security’s Reinvention Blueprints, focused on undoing DOGE’s cuts and finding new ways to expand the federal bureaucracy the moment Democrats return to power.
The irony writes itself. They called conservatives’ governing document a threat to democracy. They are now producing their own governing document. The difference is that theirs involves making the government bigger.
NOTUS: Ex-Biden Officials Are Planning How to Build Back the Government Post-DOGE
Former Biden administration officials are contending with a new reality: Future administrations won’t have a choice but to confront the way the Trump administration has disrupted how the government… pic.twitter.com/3mJ3RovF9x
— Politics & Poll Tracker ? (@PollTracker2024) August 11, 2026
The authors are a roster of senior Biden administration operatives: Dani Schulkin from DOJ and the White House Homeland Security office; K. Sabeel Rahman, who effectively ran the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from 2021 to 2023; Rob Shriver, who served as Acting OPM Director in 2024; and Loren DeJonge Schulman from OMB. These aren’t fringe academics. These are the people who ran the Biden bureaucracy — and who now want to rebuild it on an even grander scale.
Rahman’s framing captures the ambition perfectly: “We have a lot of rebuilding to do. Our ambition shouldn’t be just limited to gluing the broken pieces of the vase back together.”
No. They want a new vase. A bigger one. One with a brand new Cabinet-level agency that consolidates all federal administrative work — HR, technology, financial management — under a single roof. Other proposals include overhauling federal pay structures to compete with the private sector and a campaign to rewrite federal collective bargaining rights.
More bureaucrats. More centralized power. More union protections. More spending. And a shiny new Cabinet department to manage all of it.
Far-left activist Tara Dawson McGuinness — one of the other authors — framed it with admirable frankness: “This is a roadmap for people who want the government to work.” What she means, of course, is a roadmap for people who want the government to grow — because in the progressive worldview, bigger government and better government are the same thing. The DOGE cuts that eliminated USAID, streamlined duplicative programs, and removed layers of administrative overhead aren’t evidence that government can work leaner. They’re an emergency requiring reversal.
The timing of this effort deserves emphasis. Democrats are building their governing playbook right now — during an August recess that John Thune handed them, while Senate Republicans are at the pool declining to pass the SAVE America Act. The swamp doesn’t take recesses. It uses them.
Republicans need to understand what a Democratic House majority actually means. It isn’t just investigations and impeachment theater. It’s this — the full machinery of the Biden bureaucracy rebuilt, expanded, and ready to run the moment a Democratic hand signs the executive orders.
They’re already writing the manual. Republicans should be paying attention.
