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Unions Condemn Executive Order Allowing Trump to Replace Federal Workers With 'Political Loyalists'
The head of America's largest federal workers union called it "a blatant attempt to corrupt the federal government by eliminating employees’ due process rights so they can be fired for political reasons."
Jun 05, 2026
Labor unions are warning that an executive order signed this week by President Donald Trump will allow his administration to replace thousands of career civil servants with "political loyalists."
The order, signed on Wednesday, converts around 8,000 federal workers—most of whom are at senior levels in the civil service with major influence over policy decisions—to Schedule Policy/Career (P/C) status, formerly known as Schedule F, effectively making them "at-will" employees whom the president can fire at his discretion.
While a small number, around 4,000, of the roughly 2 million federal workers are considered political appointees, most federal employees cannot be removed purely for failing to serve the agenda of the president and can usually only be fired for issues like inadequate performance or misconduct, which involves an appeal process.
But as part of the Trump administration's effort to dismantle what it's described as a "deep state" of disloyal bureaucrats, a major objective of the Heritage Foundation's right-wing manifesto Project 2025, those 8,000 employees may now be fired for "subversion of presidential directives."
According to the US Office of Personnel Management, this could be just the beginning—with as many as 50,000 employees potentially in consideration to be rescheduled.
A fact sheet released by the White House said that despite the reclassification, “these remain ‘career’ positions and the non-partisan hiring processes, competitive status, and other aspects of these roles will not change,” while “removal decisions will also be made without respect to political affiliation.”
But Trump-loyal department heads—everywhere from the Department of Justice to the Pentagon—have systematically purged employees across executive departments that are perceived as Trump's political enemies.
AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler said on Thursday that "Schedule P/C is the next phase in Trump’s anti-worker agenda to replace government workers with political loyalists who answer only to him."
"As we’ve seen from his first day in office, the president is determined to tear down the architecture of our federal government and replace it with a system of corruption to benefit powerful CEOs and billionaire union-busters," she said.
It's part of a broader attack on the federal workforce in Trump's second term. Through a combination of firings, layoffs, and forced resignations, he has reduced the number of government employees by nearly 300,000, causing chaos and understaffing at many agencies. He's also stripped more than 1 million unionized federal workers of their right to collective bargaining, though courts have blocked the implementation for some workers.
Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents more than 800,000 federal workers, said Wednesday's order was "a blatant attempt to corrupt the federal government by eliminating employees’ due process rights so they can be fired for political reasons."
"The practical implications of this action are clear. Workers who once felt comfortable reporting waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement at their place of employment because they were protected from retaliation will now be afraid for their jobs if they speak out," he said. "That is a disservice to them and to the millions of Americans who rely on the federal government every day."
William Shackelford, president of the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, added that the order "threatens expanded political cronyism, increasing the risk that executive actions will be decided by the size of political contributions rather than the faithful execution of the law."
"That increases the risk of politically motivated enforcement of laws, threatening individual liberty; politically determined tariff exceptions and contract and grant awards, threatening greater corruption and waste of taxpayer dollars; and politically selective provision of services, threatening failure of government operations for disfavored groups or localities," he said.
The legal watchdog Democracy Forward has filed a lawsuit against Trump's rebranding of Schedule F as Schedule P/C at the start of his second term, which the group argued allowed several positions in the traditional nonpartisan civil service to be effectively recast as political appointees.
"For generations, our country has relied on a professional, nonpartisan civil service," said Skye Perryman, the group's president and CEO on Wednesday. "The people responsible for protecting our public health, safeguarding our environment, delivering our mail, managing our airports, protecting our public lands, and enforcing our laws should be allowed to do their jobs, not targeted by the same government they serve."
“When government experts can be fired without cause,” she added, “it’s not just federal workers who are harmed—it’s the people across the country who rely on these essential services every day.”
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New Project 2025-Backed Trump Rule Guts Protections for 50,000 Federal Workers
“This rule is a direct assault on a professional, nonpartisan, merit-based civil service and the government services the American people rely on every day," said one critic.
Feb 05, 2026
The Trump administration on Thursday finalized a major civil service rule change that makes it easier to fire certain federal employees and replace them with political loyalists—a move that critics say increases the likelihood of abuse of power.
The new policy at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)—the federal government's independent central human resources agency—reclassifies tens of thousands of federal workers as "policy/career," making them effectively at-will employees and easier to terminate.
The policy, known as Schedule F, was first proposed by President Donald Trump during his first term, which expired before he could fully implement it. Former President Joe Biden rescinded the policy, but Trump revived it on his first day back in office in January 2025, despite warnings from experts who say it is illegal.
Schedule F is one of the policies recommended in Project 2025, the far-right initiative to boost the power of the presidency and purge the federal civil service.
OPM estimates that around 2% of the federal workforce, or approximately 50,000 employees, will be affected by the rule change, which the agency said is aimed at "strengthening accountability, improving performance, and reinforcing a merit-based federal workforce."
Scott Kupor, who heads the OPM, said in a statement that the rule change “restores a basic principle of democratic governance: Those entrusted with shaping and executing policy must be accountable for results.”
“This rule preserves merit-based hiring, veterans’ preference, and whistle-blower protections while ensuring senior career officials responsible for advancing President Trump’s agenda can be held to the same performance expectations that exist throughout much of the American work force," he added.
However, critics are sounding the alarm over parts of the new policy, including a provision allowing agencies to fire employees who "obstruct the democratic process by intentionally subverting presidential directives."
“This rule is a direct assault on a professional, nonpartisan, merit-based civil service and the government services the American people rely on every day,” American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) national president Everett Kelley said in a statement.
“When people see turmoil and controversy in Washington, they don’t ask for more politics in government, they ask for competence and professionalism," Kelley continued. "OPM is doing the opposite. They’re rebranding career public servants as ‘policy’ employees, silencing whistleblowers, and replacing competent professionals with political flunkies without any neutral, independent protections against politicization and arbitrary abuse of power.”
“A professional civil service means nurses and doctors can advocate for patient safety, inspectors can report violations, cybersecurity experts can warn about threats, and benefits specialists can tell the truth about what it takes to deliver services—without worrying they’ll be punished for it,” Kelley argued.
“Turning tens or maybe hundreds thousands of these professionals into at-will employees doesn’t make government more accountable," he added. "It makes it more vulnerable to pressure, retaliation, and political interference, which is exactly the opposite of what the public is asking for right now.”
Democracy Forward, which represents AFGE and another public sector union in a lawsuit challenging Trump's revival of Schedule F, said in a statement Thursday, "The final rule continues to weaken more than a century of bipartisan civil service protections by allowing the administration to remove experienced, nonpolitical federal employees at will while stripping away civil service protections, meaningful oversight, and appeal rights."
"Existing law already provides mechanisms to address employee misconduct," the group added. "This rule is not about accountability, but about politicization."
The Trump-Vance admin is choosing to ignore countless concerns from the American public in order to implement a cornerstone of Project 2025 – an unlawful effort to weaken and politicize the nonpartisan civil service through regulation. To that we say: we will see you in court.
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— Democracy Forward (@democracyforward.org) February 5, 2026 at 7:06 AM
Democracy Forward president and CEO Skye Perryman said that "this proposal was wrong when it was outlined in Project 2025, wrong when the president issued an executive order, and it remains wrong now... This is a deliberate attempt to do through regulation what the law does not allow—strip public servants of their rights and make it easier to fire them for political reasons and harm the American people through doing so."
"We have successfully fought this kind of power grab before, and we will fight this again," Perryman vowed. "We will return to court to stop this unlawful rule and will use every legal tool available to hold this administration accountable to the people.”
On the legislative front, US Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and the late Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-Va.) last year reintroduced the Save the Civil Service Act, which aims "to protect the federal workforce from politicization and political manipulation."
“The civil servants who make up our federal workforce are the engine that keeps our federal government running,” Connolly, who died last May of cancer, said at the time. “They are our country’s greatest asset. We rely on their experience and expertise to provide every basic government service—from delivering the mail to helping families in the wake of natural disasters."
Connolly added that Trump's push to "remove qualified experts and replace them with political loyalists is a direct threat to our national security and our government’s ability to function the way the American people expect it to."
"It threatens to create a system wherein benefits and services are delivered based on the politics, not the needs, of the recipient," he added. "Expertise, not political fealty, must define our civil service.”
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Trump Advances Plan to Fill Federal Government With 'Political Cronies'
"Anyone who cares about our national security, or receives Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid... has a vested interest in protecting our merit-based federal workforce."
Apr 19, 2025
The largest federal labor union in the U.S. said Friday that tens of thousands of federal workers could soon "have their jobs politicized" and be swiftly fired under a new rule proposed by the Office of Personnel Management.
Under the rule, an estimated 50,000 career civil servants would be reclassified as "at-will" employees, removing civil service protections and making it easier for the federal government to dismiss them.
President Donald Trump and his billionaire ally, tech mogul Elon Musk, have long claimed the federal workforce is rife with "rogue bureaucrats" and is part of the "deep state," pledging to dismantle the civil service.
Trump said on his social media platform, Truth Social, that reclassifying workers "will allow the federal government to finally be 'run like a business.'"
"If these government workers refuse to advance the policy interests of the president, or are engaging in corrupt behavior, they should no longer have a job," he said.
"President Trump's action to politicize the work of tens of thousands of career federal employees will erode the government's merit-based hiring system and undermine the professional civil service that Americans rely on."
Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), said Friday's announcement was the latest "in a series of deliberate moves by this administration to corrupt the federal government and replace qualified public servants with political cronies."
"President Trump's action to politicize the work of tens of thousands of career federal employees will erode the government's merit-based hiring system and undermine the professional civil service that Americans rely on," said Kelley. "Politicizing the career civil service is a threat to our democracy and to the integrity of all the programs and services Americans rely on."
The new category for civil servants was originally called Schedule F, but the White House said it was changing the classification to "Schedule Policy/Career."
U.S. Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner and Rep. Gerry Connolly, all Democrats from Virginia whose constituents include many federal employees, said Saturday that Trump's proposal to "hire and fire these workers based on their politics, not their qualifications... makes us all less safe."
The lawmakers have all backed legislation to protect the federal civil service from being reclassified outside of merit system principles without the approval of Congress, and issued a warning to congressional Republicans who have heard from angry constituents in recent weeks about the administration's spending cuts through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
"Anyone who cares about our national security, or receives Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or any other critical service administered by the federal government, has a vested interest in protecting our merit-based federal workforce," said the lawmakers. "We have long fought for legislation to protect the federal workforce from this kind of attack. To our colleagues who will hear from their constituents if government services continue to decline because of this decision: You were warned."
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Head of Largest Federal Worker Union Urges Senate to Block Russell Vought
Meanwhile, leading Democratic senators held the upper chamber floor in opposition to his nomination to lead the Office of Management and Budget.
Feb 05, 2025
The head of the largest federal employees' union is urging U.S. senators to vote against confirming Russell Vought as Office of Management and Budget director, as the Senate's top Democrat delivered a scathing floor speech Wednesday highlighting Vought's "role as the chief architect of Project 2025 and the devastating impact his policies would have on working families across the country."
American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) national president Everett Kelley said in a letter distributed to media outlets this week that "Russell Vought's agenda in the previous Trump administration is clearly alive and well as the current Trump administration has already taken steps to reimplement an even more expansive Schedule F and to purportedly override collective bargaining agreements in various contexts."
Schedule F refers to an executive order issued by Republican President Donald Trump at the end of his first term that would have stripped employment protections from career civil servants had former President Joe Biden not rescinded it within days of taking office in 2021. AFGE and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees last week filed a lawsuit arguing that Trump "illegally exceeded his authority" by attempting to weaken Biden-era worker protections.
"Of all people Donald Trump could have picked to lead White House policy, he chose the godfather of the ultraright."
"As OMB director during President Trump's first term, Vought pursued an agenda to effectively nullify the nonpartisan civil service system by attempting to convert tens of thousands of career employees to political appointments, gut their collective bargaining rights, and prevent unions from providing fair and effective representation to all workers," AFGE explained in an email Wednesday. "Vought has also made deeply disturbing comments about the civil service, including portraying them as villains and saying he wants to put federal workers in trauma."
Also on Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Gary Peters (D-Mich.), and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) held the Senate floor in opposition to Vought's nomination.
"Of all the harmful nominees, of all the extremists that Donald Trump has elevated, of all the hard-right ideologues who have come before the Senate, none of them hold a candle to Russell Vought," Schumer said. "He is far and away the most dangerous to the American people."
"Most people have never heard of Russell Vought before, but make no mistake about it, my fellow Americans: He is the most important piece of the puzzle in Donald Trump's second term," the senator continued. "He will be the quarterback of White House policy. For all intents and purposes, he will run the command center of the Trump administration. His decisions will reverberate from one end of America to the other, in every city, in every town, every household, and every rural area."
"And of all people Donald Trump could have picked to lead White House policy, he chose the godfather of the ultraright," Schumer added. "Make no mistake, Russell Vought is Project 2025 incarnate."
Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) said Wednesday that he would lead a Thursday filibuster against Vought.
Vought currently leads the think tank Center for Renewing America, whose motto is: "For God. For Country. For Community."
A defender of Christian nationalism, Vought co-authored the policy portion of Project 2025, a blueprint for a far-right overhaul of the federal government. Vought's Project 2025 proposals include dramatic cuts to critical public programs, abolishing or gutting essential government agencies, a national abortion ban, and other right-wing wish list items.
While Trump has attempted to distance himself from the deeply unpopular initiative led by the Heritage Foundation, at least 140 people who worked in his first administration—including six former Cabinet secretaries—have been involved with Project 2025.
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Major Public Sector Unions Sue Over Trump's 'Politicization' of Civil Service
The head of a legal group representing the plaintiffs called the Trump administration's effort to "politicize" nonpartisan federal employees "simply and clearly illegal."
Jan 30, 2025
Two unions representing federal employees filed a complaint in federal court on Wednesday arguing that U.S. President Donald Trump "illegally exceeded his authority" by attempting to roll back Biden-era worker protections when he implemented his "Schedule F" executive order, a measure aimed at removing job protections for many career federal employees.
The plaintiffs are the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents some 800,000 federal civilian employees, and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), which represents some 1.4 million public employees, including federal workers.
The unions argue that Schedule F, which creates a new category of federal employees and makes it easier for a president to remove career civil servants not normally impacted by a presidential transition, is a scheme that put politics over professionalism.
"Despite this long-standing recognition of the importance of our professional civil service and protections against its politicization, the recently issued Schedule F order announces President Trump's intent to reclassify many career civil servants into a new category of federal employees and strip away their civil service protections so that they can be more easily fired," the plaintiffs argued.
Another union representing federal employees, National Treasury Employees Union, also filed a lawsuit challenging Schedule F last week.
The order, signed on Trump's first day in office, is a redux of an executive order that he implemented at the tail end of his first term, which was later reversed by former President Joe Biden.
In a statement Wednesday, AFSCME president Lee Saunders said that Schedule F "is a shameless attempt to politicize the federal workforce by replacing thousands of dedicated, qualified civil servants with political cronies."
"Our union was born in the fight for a professional, nonpartisan civil service, and our communities will pay the price if these anti-union extremists are allowed to undo decades of progress by stripping these workers of their freedoms. Together, we are fighting back," he said.
On Monday, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued guidance for the heads of departments and agencies to determine which workers are subject to Trump's Schedule F order.
The memo from OPM is "broadly worded; just about anyone in the civil service could be swept up into this category," Alan Lescht, a Washington, D.C.-based employment lawyer who represents federal workers, told the outlet Axios.
OPM, acting OPM Director Charles Ezell, and Trump are all listed as defendants in the lawsuit, which alleges that Trump overstepped his legal authority when he issued Schedule F and rendered parts of a preexisting OPM rule that reinforced civil service protections and merit system principles "inoperative and without effect."
The suit argues that OPM failed to adhere to the "notice-and-comment process" under Administrative Procedure Act when it rendered those regulatory provisions inoperative.
"In just the nine days since Trump took office, his administration has repeatedly demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law in service of its political objectives," said Democracy Forward president and CEO Skye Perryman, whose firm is serving as co-counsel for the plaintiffs, in a Wednesday statement.
The Trump administration's effort "to politicize the nonpartisan, independent federal employees who protect our national and domestic security, ensure our food and medications are safe, deliver essential services to people and communities everywhere, and much more is simply and clearly illegal," Perryman said.
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Unscrubbed PDFs Reveal Authors of Trump Memos Are Project 2025 Heavy Hitters
"Trump has denied or downplayed links to Project 2025," said the researcher who exposed the memos' authors. "These documents show that implementation is well underway."
Jan 28, 2025
A U.S. tech researcher on Tuesday revealed that the authors of policies published by Republican President Donald Trump's Office of Personnel Management have links to the far-right Heritage Foundation and its most infamous initiative, Project 2025.
On her [citation needed] website, Molly White exposed Noah Peters as the true author of Office of Personnel Management (OPM) acting Director Charles Ezell's Tuesday memo providing guidance on policy strikingly similar to Schedule F—which White described as "an effort to enable Trump to purge civil servants and replace them with loyalists."
White also revealed that James Sherk wrote a pair of joint OMP/Office of Management and Budget memos forcing federal workers to return to in-person work and implementing a government-wide hiring freeze.
According to White:
As far back as 2023, the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 was recommending Peters for a position in Trump's second administration. Peters had previously been appointed in 2019 as the solicitor at the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA), where he "aided and defended Trump appointees' anti-union FLRA policies that went against decades of the agency's own precedents," according to Court Accountability Action and State Democracy Defenders Action. Peters returned to private practice in 2022, but recently quietly updated his LinkedIn profile to reflect a new title of "senior adviser" to the Office of Personnel Management. This appointment does not appear to have been announced anywhere else...
James Sherk was announced as assistant to the president for domestic policy on January 18. A White House official during Trump's first term, Sherk was a key figure in Trump's Schedule F endeavors. After [former Democratic President Joe] Biden was elected and he quickly repealed Schedule F, Sherk slunk off to the America First Policy Institute to continue efforts to advance Trump's policies. Prior to these positions, he was a staff member at the Heritage Foundation.
White pointed to an unverified Reddit post by someone claiming to be an OPM employee and federal worker for nearly 20 years as cause for alarm.
"I've never witnessed anything even remotely close to what's happening right now," the poster wrote. "In short, there's a hostile takeover of the civil service."
"Let me say this in no uncertain terms—OPM has been compromised and taken over... by outside politicals," the Reddit user continued. "In just five days, they managed to push aside dozens of nonpolitical, career civil servants who were there specifically to prevent the civil service from becoming the president's henchmen."
"The nonpolitical civil servants here at OPM are watching helplessly as our government is being systematically dismantled bit by bit," the poster warned. Even the [inspector generals] are being fired to prevent them from investigating the numerous whistleblower complaints we've filed."
Returning to the memos written by Peters and Sherk, White noted: "While Project 2025 and similar initiatives have been public about their plans to reshape the federal workforce, Trump and other figures in his administration have denied or downplayed links with the initiative. These documents provide further evidence that the implementation is already well underway, with designated personnel quietly drafting policies that were intended only to be publicly attributed to those in charge of the federal agencies."
At least 140 people who worked in Trump's first administration—including six former Cabinet secretaries—have been involved with Project 2025.
On Monday, the National Treasury Employees Union—which represents approximately 150,000 workers across 35 federal agencies—sued the Trump administration over its moves to politicize the civil service and disempower employees.
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Federal Workers Sue Trump Over Attempt to Create 'Army of Sycophants'
"This order is about administering political loyalty tests to everyday employees in the federal workforce," said the president of the National Treasury Employees Union.
Jan 21, 2025
A union representing workers across dozens of federal agencies sued the Trump administration late Monday over an executive order stripping many career civil servants of protections designed to insulate them from political pressure.
The lawsuit was filed by the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) shortly after President Donald Trump signed an order that reinstated, with some amendments, the "Schedule F" measure he implemented at the tail end of his first White House term—an action that former President Joe Biden reversed.
On Monday, Trump rescinded Biden's order and signed a new one declaring that "any power" federal employees have "is delegated by the president, and they must be accountable to the president." Trump also moved to reverse a Biden administration rule that bolstered protections for career federal workers.
Referring to the new order during a post-inauguration event, Trump said that "we're getting rid of all of the cancer, the cancer caused by the Biden administration."
NTEU national president Doreen Greenwald in a statement that "this order is about administering political loyalty tests to everyday employees in the federal workforce who took an oath to uphold the Constitution and serve their country."
"Trump's order is a blatant attempt to corrupt the federal government by eliminating employees' due process rights so they can be fired for political reasons."
Restoring Schedule F—which reclassified tens of thousands of federal workers as political appointees, making them easier to terminate—was one of the policy priorities laid out in the Project 2025 agenda crafted by dozens of officials from Trump's first administration. Analysts have argued that Schedule F is illegal.
Vox's Zack Beauchamp warned that "in theory," Trump's restoration of Schedule F "could be as damaging to democracy as the birthright citizenship order—if not more so."
"Schedule F in its original form applied, per some estimates, to somewhere around 50,000 civil servants (and potentially quite a lot more)," Beauchamp noted. "Purging that many people and allowing Trump to replace them with cronies would be a powerful tool for turning the federal government into an extension of his will."
Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in a statement Monday that "Trump's order is a blatant attempt to corrupt the federal government by eliminating employees' due process rights so they can be fired for political reasons."
"This unprecedented assertion of executive power will create an army of sycophants beholden only to Donald Trump, not the Constitution or the American people," Kelley added. "The integrity of the entire federal government could be irreparably harmed if this is not stopped."
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Progressives Slam 'Extremist' Plans of Project 2025 Architect Tapped for Key Trump Post
Russell Vought, Trump's pick to head the White House Office of Management and Budget, was questioned by members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee during a Wednesday confirmation hearing.
Jan 15, 2025
As a U.S. Senate committee held a confirmation hearing for Russell Vought—Republican President-elect Donald Trump's pick to head the White House Office of Management and Budget—progressive critics underscored what they called the extremism of the controversial nominee, who played a key role in crafting a proposed initiative to expand executive power and purge the federal civil service.
Vought—who was questioned Wednesday by members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee—served as both acting director and director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) during Trump's first term. He currently leads the think tank Center for Renewing America, whose motto is "For God. For Country. For Community."
The defender of Christian nationalism recently co-authored the policy portion of Project 2025, which includes dramatic cuts to critical public programs, abolishing or gutting essential government agencies, a national abortion ban, and a litany of additional far-right wish list items. While Trump has tried to distance himself from the deeply unpopular proposal, at least 140 people who worked in his first administration—including six former Cabinet secretaries—have been involved with Project 2025.
Tapped to oversee an agency that plays a key role in managing civil servants, Vought was secretly recorded saying he wants government officials to be "traumatically affected" by his reforms "because they are increasingly viewed as the villains."
Debra Perlin, policy director at the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility in Washington, submitted written testimony to the Senate committee in which she warned that "should he be confirmed, it is abundantly clear that Mr. Vought intends to misuse his authority as director of OMB to harm civil servants, and as a result, endanger the American public."
Perlin continued:
During his tenure as OMB acting director and then director from January 2019 to January 2021, Mr. Vought was a central figure in attempting to implement Schedule F, President Trump's executive order that would have upended the merit-based civil service system by stripping employment protections away from thousands of career civil servants had President [Joe] Biden not rescinded it. Mr. Vought has called for reinstating Schedule F and was a key architect of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's sweeping—and wildly unpopular—conservative policy plan that advocates for dismantling the civil service. If Schedule F is reinstated, it would not only harm federal employees but would also cause catastrophic harm to government services, as well as causing deep economic impacts in places with significant populations of government workers including California, Texas, Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., among others.
In addition to Mr. Vought's intention to dismantle the civil service, he has pushed extreme strategies to consolidate presidential power under the banner of "radical constitutionalism." He supports the president withholding congressionally appropriated funds in violation of the Impoundment Control Act, bypassing the advice and consent of the Senate to push recess appointments, invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military on the American public, and abusing emergency powers. These plans to expand presidential power are even more troubling taken with Mr. Vought's stated desire to reduce the independence of federal agencies such as the Department of Justice, in part by purging agencies of career civil servants that are seen as standing in the way of the president's agenda. Mr. Vought has called for "an army of investigators" to prosecute current and former government officials who sought to hold President Trump accountable.
"These are just some of the ways Mr. Vought intends to misuse his own authority and craft plans for the president to subvert the law and, in the process, American democracy," Perlin added.
In a statement coinciding with Wednesday's hearing, Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said: "Vought has no business going back to OMB. His extreme ideological opposition to regulations that protect consumers, workers, our environment, and public health and safety will lead to more deregulatory disasters that harm all of us."
"He wants to slash funding for critical government agencies and services, interfere with agencies that are supposed to be politically independent, exclude the benefits of regulation from cost-benefit analysis, and fire vast numbers of civil service employees simply for doing their jobs," Gilbert added. "In addition, he abused his power during his last tenure at OMB to override agency experts, repeatedly endangering public health and safety. The Senate should reject this dangerous and extreme nomination."
Congressman Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), founder of the Stop Project 2025 Task Force, said Wednesday that "we don't have to guess if Russ Vought will enact the radical vision laid out in Project 2025 if he is confirmed, because he literally wrote the playbook and his record shows that he will stop at nothing to enact it."
"He is a self-avowed Christian nationalist who plans to dismantle the civil service—replacing thousands of qualified, nonpartisan federal employees such as scientists and engineers with political lackeys who will be selected to follow partisan orders above the law or the Constitution," the lawmaker continued. "He has vowed to ignore the Constitution by seizing unlawful power for Trump to unilaterally withhold or redirect funds for entire agencies or programs that Congress appropriated."
"His aggressive plan to gut checks and balances clears the way for Trump to enact his entire Project 2025 agenda to sell out the middle class, threaten personal rights and freedoms, and impose biblical morality codes on all of us," Huffman added. "We cannot take that risk and let this authoritarian architect of Project 2025 anywhere near the federal budget or the Oval Office."
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'Truly Horrifying': Trump Allies Already Making List of Federal Employees to Target
"This is an intimidation tactic to try to menace federal workers and sow fear," said the American Federation of Government Employees.
Jun 24, 2024
A right-wing organization allied with presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump and funded by the group behind Project 2025 has reportedly begun assembling a list of federal employees deemed potentially disloyal to the former president, an effort that is drawing comparisons to the McCarthyite crusades of the 1950s.
The American Accountability Foundation (AAF), headed by former Republican Senate staffer Tom Jones, is "digging into the backgrounds, social media posts, and commentary of key high-ranking government employees, starting with the Department of Homeland Security," The Associated Press reported Monday.
The group, according to AP, is "relying in part on tips from his network of conservative contacts, including workers." AAF, which received a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation—the right-wing group spearheading Project 2025—intends to publish its list online once it's completed.
In its
announcement of the $100,000 "innovation prize," the Heritage Foundation said the award would support AAF researchers as they work to "alert Congress, a conservative administration, and the American people to the presence of anti-American bad actors burrowed into the administrative state and ensure appropriate action is taken." Heritage proudly noted that AAF contributed to the smear campaign that derailed Gigi Sohn, President Joe Biden's erstwhile nominee to serve on the Federal Communications Commission.
This is a truly horrifying story about MAGA hunting federal workers. ⤵️ One complaint: the piece falls for the ruse that Heritage is doing this separate from trump but the two are joined at the hip on project 2025. News coverage should clearly say that. https://t.co/4XqkLxd6QX pic.twitter.com/H5dOHpIm3g
— Jennifer Schulze (@NewsJennifer) June 24, 2024
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the nation's largest federal workers union, condemned AAF's initiative as "an intimidation tactic to try to menace federal workers and sow fear."
"Civil servants are required take an oath to the Constitution—not a loyalty test to a president," the union wrote on social media.
During his final weeks in office, Trump signed an executive order establishing an entirely new category of federal employees known as "Schedule F." Before Biden rescinded the order shortly after taking office in 2021, tens of thousands of federal workers were to be reassigned to the new category, under which they would lose employment protections typically afforded to career civil servants—making them far easier to fire.
Trump has made clear that, if he beats Biden in November, he intends to revive the Schedule F order as part of a broader effort to bend the federal government to his will and target his political enemies.
"We will pass critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States," Trump said during a rally in South Carolina in March 2022, before he formally launched his 2024 campaign. "The deep state must and will be brought to heel."
Axios has reported that Trump's "top allies are preparing to radically reshape the federal government if he is reelected, purging potentially thousands of civil servants and filling career posts with loyalists to him and his 'America First' ideology."
"The public list-making conjures for some the era of Joseph McCarthy, the senator who conducted grueling hearings into suspected communist sympathizers during the Cold War," AP reported. "The hearings were orchestrated by a top staffer, Roy Cohn, who became a confidant of a younger Trump."
AP noted that while AAF "won't necessarily be recommending whether to fire or reassign the federal workers it lists," the group's work "aligns with Heritage's far-reaching Project 2025 blueprint for a conservative administration." The blueprint states that Trump's Schedule F order "must be reinstituted."
Skye Perryman, CEO of the watchdog group Democracy Forward, told the outlet that AAF's plans recall some of "the darker parts of American history."
Echoing AFGE, Perryman said Trump's allies are trying to "chill the work of these civil servants" as part of a "retribution agenda."
"They're seeking to undermine our democracy," she added.
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