As plans for a second, “better” (read: more competent in its authoritarianism) Trump administration take shape six months out from the 2024 election, a frightening new initiative appears to be part of it: the creation of a blacklist of federal workers whom conservatives worry might attempt to block the implementation of Trump policies.
Project Sovereignty 2025, a McCarthyite plan to identify and make public names of governmental employees serving as bulwarks against unconstitutional border and deportation policies, is the creation of former Republican congressional aide Tom Jones and his American Accountability Foundation, an AP report revealed. Jones won a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation to create the blacklist. According to the AP, Jones’s work is based largely on “gut check[s]” and “instinct,” running roughshod over the lives of federal workers to ensure the easy implementation of conservative policies should Trump win in November.
The dystopian measure appears to be the newest scheme of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda. The blacklist is an outgrowth of the agenda, outlined in a 900-page document, to stock the federal government with ideologically sympathetic civil servants willing to shirk their duties to expedite ultraconservative orders. Key to Project 2025 is the proposed revival of Trump’s Schedule F executive order, a provision that reclassifies civil servants as political appointees, making them easier to fire. Jones’s list of enemies would be used to target workers for removal from the government under Schedule F, which the Biden administration repealed.
The conservative attempt to weaponize the civil service is alarming, if predictable. It follows from a first Trump term that saw constant turnover in leadership, often over perceived disloyalty to the president, and efforts to gum up the works of the administration by resisting civil servants. That the conservative movement is building an infrastructure to circumvent those civil servants who stood up in the face of the Trump administration’s most egregious overreaches should concern those who, resisting invocations of the “fascist” label, insist that despite his fascistic rhetoric, Trump essentially governed as a standard conservative during his time in office. With the weight of legacy conservative institutions like the Heritage Foundation and their open witch-hunting cadres like the American Accountability Foundation behind it, a second Trump administration would be even more disastrous for the rule of law than the first.
