Legal experts have raised red flags repeatedly about Project 2025, a plan backed by the extreme-right Heritage Foundation to help Donald Trump — or any other future Republican president — purge the federal government of rank-and-file employees who will follow the law over the orders of the president and institute Christian nationalist principles, among other things.
Now, according to the Associated Press, Heritage is paying another right-wing organization to spy on federal workers and compile a list of those who would be disloyal to Trump if he retakes the presidency this year.
"Tom Jones and his American Accountability Foundation are digging into the backgrounds, social media posts and commentary of key high-ranking government employees, starting with the .
"They’re relying in part on tips from his network of conservative contacts, including workers. In a move that alarms some, they’re preparing to publish the findings online," reported Lisa Mascaro. "With a $100,000 grant from the influential , the goal 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 — and ripe for scrutiny, ."
Jones, a Kentucky-based operative who used to work as a GOP Senate aide on Capitol Hill, made the purpose of his project clear: “We need to understand who these people are and what they do.”
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Experts reacted to the news with alarm. Jacqueline Simon, who heads up the American Federation of Government Employees, a large federal worker union that has endorsed Biden's re-election, told the AP, “It just seems as though their goal is to try to menace federal employees and sow fear.”
The federal civil service has longstanding merit protections in place that are designed to restrict hirings and firings based on political motivation, a hard-won reform that dates back to 19th-century efforts to defeat the old corrupt practice of presidents rewarding friends and special interests with federal appointments. Toward the end of his term, Trump tried to gut these protections by reclassifying large swathes of federal employees as "Schedule F," allowing them to be dismissed at will.
President Joe Biden rolled back this change as soon as he took office, and has implemented other changes designed to protect federal workers, but it features prominently as part of the Project 2025 strategy.
