Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) said Wednesday that former President Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) would “go on a murdering spree” if the presumptive GOP nominee wins a second term in the White House this coming November.
In a House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing on the Office of Personnel Management, Pressley warned of what she viewed as negative policy implications of “Project 2025” — a detailed set of policies, spearheaded by the conservative Heritage Foundation, that would drastically reshape the federal government to support a hypothetical future Republican president.
The effort — sometimes referred to as a blueprint for a second Trump administration — would consolidate executive power, slash funding for many agencies, and replace career civil servants with loyal supporters of the president in an executive order known as “Schedule F.”
“It is critical that we understand that the far-right extremists who are advocating for Schedule F see it as a means to an end. It is their pathway to enact widespread wholesale policy violence,” Pressley said at the hearing.
“One thing I know for sure about Trump and his sycophants is that they telegraph their harm,” she added.
Pressley said she wanted to “sound the alarm” about Project 2025, which she described as a “far-right manifesto” that is “a 1,000-page bucket list of extremist policies that would uproot every government agency and disrupt the lives of every person who calls this country home.”
Pressley criticized Project 2025’s position on the use of the death penalty — a practice the Massachusetts Democrat has long fought to abolish.
“The Department of Justice would go on a murdering spree,” she said. “It would rush to use the death penalty and expand its use to even more people, while circumventing due process protections.”
Project 2025, according to its text, calls for “the next conservative Administration” to “do everything possible to obtain finality for the 44 prisoners currently on federal death row."
Only 16 people have been executed by the federal government since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1988. Most executions are imposed under the states' respective death penalty laws.
The Trump administration carried out 13 of the 16 executions in the final months of his term in office.
In a statement to The Hill, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung pushed back on Pressley’s characterization of Trump’s agenda for the DOJ during the hearing, calling Pressley an “unserious” person for “using ridiculous language like that.”
