The people who brought you Project 2025 are getting to work on destroying the government early with Project Sovereignty 2025, readying for a purge of civil service employees whom they deem “anti-American bad actors burrowed into the administrative state.” This is something Donald Trump tried to do at the end of his term, and President Joe Biden undid it. But it wouldn’t be a slapdash experiment for Trump the second time around—he’s got the blueprint and his team has the experience to do it
The Associated Press reports that Republican insider Tom Jones and his American Accountability Foundation recently received a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation, and they are already on the job trawling through the backgrounds, social media posts, and statements from high-ranking civil servants in the Department of Homeland Security, partly using tips from conservative contacts.
“We need to understand who these people are and what they do,” Jones, a former aide to Republican senators, told the Associated Press.
The immediate goal of the group is to “post 100 names of government workers to a website this summer to show a potential new administration who might be standing in the way of a second-term Trump agenda—and ripe for scrutiny, reclassifications, reassignments or firings,” the Associated Press reports.
Posting it wouldn’t be necessary for a potential Trump administration, but it can certainly sow division and mistrust among government employees, and subject them to threats from Trump’s MAGA hordes.
Jacqueline Simon, policy director at the American Federation of Government Employees, called the program “shocking,” telling the Associated Press, “It just seems as though their goal is to try to menace federal employees and sow fear.”
In 2020, Trump attempted to reclassify a chunk of federal civil service employees—nonpolitical career personnel who make up the bulk of the federal workforce—and gut protections for them. His executive order created a new federal employment category—Schedule F—for his perceived enemies in the government, allowing them to be fired at his will to make way for his loyalists.
The plan to resurrect Trump’s scheme has been in the works since his 2020 defeat. Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, told The New York Times last year that the goal is to “flood the zone with conservative personnel” in a way they weren’t prepared for after Trump’s 2016 victory. This time around, they will go in with their list ready and their ducks in a row.
Trump’s executive order, though unsuccessful, proved to be a lot more expansive and harsh than originally perceived, according to a report from The Washington Post earlier this year. At the time, Trump’s order said it would apply just to employees “in positions of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character.” That would affect about 50,000 workers.
A Freedom of Information Act request by the National Treasury Employees Union for plans from Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, however, showed how much deeper it would go under a Trump cabinet member, the Washington Post reported. Then-Director of the OMB Russell Vought had drawn up plans to cut as much as 68% of the OMB staff, from senior attorneys all the way down to administrative staff who weren’t involved in policy-making.
Extrapolating from that, the number of total employees subject to a political purge “could be much higher [than the 50,000 estimate] and sweep up all kinds of employees around the country,” NTEU President Doreen Greenwald told reporters.
That gives a preview of what Trump and his team would do given the second chance to create a government loyal not to the American people but to Trump. And in typical MAGA fashion, they’re putting federal workers’ safety in jeopardy even now.
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