How the Center Can Own Tomorrow's Agenda
Two extreme blueprints are competing to govern America. The center needs to write its own.
The Danger of Wild Pendulum Swings
Over the past two weeks, we have published detailed accounts of two governing blueprints that every American who cares about the future of this country should understand.
The first, Project 2025 Status Report: We Centrists Should Be Alarmed, documents how a 920-page conservative roadmap has reshaped the executive branch at a speed most citizens never saw coming. More than half of its proposals have already been initiated or completed, and a significant portion of what has been done cannot be reversed without an act of Congress.
The second, The Far Right’s Blueprint Is Underway. What Is the Left Planning?, walks through the architecture of a hypothetical progressive counter-effort being discussed in left-leaning organizations, one that would use the same tools, the same executive power, and the same four-year window to push the government just as far in the opposite direction.
Both blueprints share a common philosophy: use the full power of the executive branch to transform government as rapidly as possible, replace career professionals with ideological loyalists, and move faster than the opposition can organize a legal response. The spoils system, it turns out, has no party affiliation.
The question for the 45 percent of Americans who consider themselves politically independent is not which blueprint is more dangerous. The question is what comes after, and whether anyone has a plan that does not involve swinging the pendulum as far in the other direction as it has already swung in this one.
What Can Actually Be Undone
Not everything Project 2025 has built is permanent, but the distinction between what is reversible and what is not matters enormously. USAID, the foreign aid agency shuttered on July 1, 2025, cannot be reopened without an act of Congress, years of institutional reconstruction, and the rebuilding of thousands of international partner relationships. The 260,000 federal workers who left government service in 2025 carried decades of institutional knowledge with them that no executive order can restore. The 8,000 federal web pages and 3,000 government datasets that were removed, including most of the government’s publicly available climate science resources, are gone.
What is reversible requires two things working together: the right election outcomes in November and the deliberate, disciplined use of legislative and executive authority to rebuild what was taken apart. Reversing the Schedule Policy/Career rule that stripped civil service protections from 50,000 federal employees is achievable through the regulatory process, but it requires a president willing to prioritize it and a Congress capable of supporting it. Restoring independent oversight at agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau requires legislation. Rebuilding the civil service as a merit-based institution, insulated from the ideological demands of whichever party holds power, requires a genuine commitment to the principle that government employees serve the public, not a political movement.
None of this happens automatically. And none of it can be accomplished by a political party that wins power and immediately begins loading the government with its own loyalists, which is precisely what a hypothetical Project 2028 would attempt to do from the opposite direction.
The Safeguard the Country Needs
Here is the structural problem that neither party has been willing to address honestly: the tools that made Project 2025 possible are not unique to the right. Executive orders, agency rulemaking, personnel appointments, and the federal budget are available to any president. If the only answer to one ideological blueprint is a counter-blueprint from the other side, the country will spend the next generation watching government lurch from one extreme to the other, with ordinary citizens absorbing the damage each time the pendulum swings.
The safeguard is not a particular party. It is a set of governing principles that hold regardless of which party is in power. Governing through compromise rather than domination. Guaranteeing transparent, fair, and nonpartisan elections with results that are accepted and upheld. Applying the law equally to everyone, with independent courts that are not stacked in any movement’s favor. Conducting the public’s business through fact-based debate, not personal attacks and bad-faith tactics. Providing essential government services while measuring results, eliminating what fails, and enforcing the kind of fiscal discipline that does not mortgage the country’s future on any single administration’s ambitions.
These are not abstract ideals. They are the specific, practical conditions under which a government of 340 million people can actually function. And they are precisely the conditions that both extreme blueprints, from the right and from the left, are designed to circumvent.
What the 2026 Elections Actually Decide
The November midterms are not simply a referendum on the current administration. They are a decision point about which portion of the Project 2025 agenda advances further, and whether the progressive infrastructure for a 2028 counter-movement gets the political oxygen it needs to accelerate. Republicans currently hold a 218 to 214 majority in the House. Expanding that majority would give the administration a realistic path to the statutory elimination of the Department of Education and the abolition of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, two proposals that executive orders alone cannot accomplish. Losing either chamber would largely end the legislative phase of the agenda.
For the center, the midterms are an opportunity to elect the kind of pragmatic, accountability-minded representatives who can put the brakes on both extremes. That means supporting candidates, in both parties and outside of them, who are willing to restore civil service protections, rebuild independent oversight of executive agencies, and use the power of the legislative branch to do what it was designed to do: check executive overreach regardless of which president is responsible for it. Term limits, transparent and fair elections, and a legislature that actually legislates are not partisan demands. They are basic requirements of a functioning democracy.
What Comes Next
The damage from Project 2025 that can be undone will take years of sustained, principled effort to reverse. The damage that cannot be undone is a permanent reminder of what happens when citizens treat elections as entertainment rather than governance decisions. And the threat from a hypothetical Project 2028 is a reminder that the problem is not one party or one movement. The problem is a political system that rewards ideological capture over genuine problem-solving, and an electorate that has not yet demanded better loudly enough.
We do not have to accept this. The future is not something that happens to us.
Which brings us to what begins on Monday.
Starting April 13, The Center Voter is launching a new publication called Foundations. Every article in this series builds the case for a principled, enduring framework to govern America, one grounded in nine guiding principles that the Center Voter community believes in and lives by. Those principles rest on three unshakeable foundations. The first is Guardrails, the structural protections that safeguard our institutions, ensure equal justice under law, and protect every vote. The second is Collaborative Governance, which replaces partisan warfare with fact-based debate and policies built to earn broad, lasting support. The third is Principled Leadership, which restores America’s role as the moral and strategic leader of free nations.
Over ten days, we will introduce each of the nine principles in depth, not as talking points, but as a genuine governing framework for a country that is ready to stop being defined by its divisions and start being built by its common ground. This is not a response to Project 2025. It is not a counter to Project 2028. It is something neither of those blueprints can offer: a foundation designed to outlast any single election, any single administration, and any single political movement.
We are 45 percent of this country, politically homeless but not without purpose, and the work of building something worthy of this nation begins Monday morning. We hope you will be there.