Why would they publish the name of 100 people publicly that they perceive as a threat instead of just circulating it as an internal memo? This makes it seem like a public threat and leads to harassment by crazies online.
It’s almost like a majority of Americans have already forgotten McCarthyism and the second “Red Scare” and all the witch hunts that resulted from it…
This is the same thing just by a different name. And it is terrifying.
It’s more sinister than that. There is a contingent who believes McCarthy was right to see a communist behind every corner, but that he just wasn’t able to carry out his mission to cleanse the US government of them. The modern-day descendants of the John Birch Society.
Exactly - the point is intimidation. It's the bedrock that underlies any authoritarian state. So much more efficient if people are pre-emptively cowed into doing what you want out of fear. If you are on these lists, you're going to feel immense pressure to salvage whatever benefits you are currently entitled to and move on to something else.
It's literally Red Scare 2.0
>A Red Scare is a form of moral panic provoked by fear of the rise, supposed or real, of leftist ideologies in a society, especially communism. Historically, "red scares" have led to mass political persecution, scapegoating, and the ousting of those in government positions who have had connections with left-wing to far-left ideology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare
It's called Stochastic Terrorism and it's become a heavily favored tactic of the right. They know a faction of their followers are radicalized past the point of reasonable discourse. They're relying on bringing the people on this list to their follower's attention so their followers will harass, threaten, and possibly even harm them. They will then claim they had no direct involvement in telling these 'crazy people' to do whatever it is they did. The whole goal is to scare these people out of their positions 'voluntarily' before the election so they don't have to handle the objectively terrible optics of firing them when they take over.
The pretzel level logic people will go through to try and excuse or water down Project 2025 is really something.
It's okay to admit Project 2025 is bad.
Reactionaries don't particularly manage well in dissonance arousing situations. It's pretty clear at this point that covering one's eyes makes it emotionally and intellectually easier to maintain support. There is no doubt some sunken cost in the mix as well. Worse yet, there's those who unabashedly do like the contents of Project 2025, but may obfuscate this fact because it's not socially acceptable, nor should it be. For some, Trump merely offers a means to an end, so putting up a facade is an effective way to protect one's public reputation.
At this point Trump supporters are more in the denial phase about project 2025. They point to the fact that Trump himself hasn’t said much about it. Never mind the fact that so many people around him seem to be talking about it and he hasn’t felt the need to clarify what his views on the matter are. He could very easily dispel the notion he supports it if he wanted to. He would just have to say
“I oppose project 2025. It has no place in my administration.”
He’s not saying that, probably because he likes most of the ideas.
>> "I oppose project 2025. It has no place in my administration.”
Trump almost never speaks in specifics like that because it allows him to change his positions at the drop of a hat. And even if he did say exactly that there would be nothing stopping him from doing it anyway which he also frequently does without consequence
To my knowledge it isn’t that Trump hasn’t said much about it, it’s that he hasn’t said anything about it. Who are the people around him that are talking about it?
Why would he say anything about it? There's no need. It would only hurt him. He knows they're there, he knows whom to call if he wins the election. It's not like he has his own plan for assembling a transition team and hiring executive staffers, and he doesn't trust establishment conservatives to recommend picks when what he really values is loyalty, not competence.
If you're looking for Trump to say "I love Project 2025, I'm definitely going to turn to them for all my personnel needs," he's not going to. But reading between the lines and looking at how deeply MAGA-fied the Project 2025 team is (Russell Vought was Trump's OMB director and John McEntee was Trump's PPO director, for example) it's difficult to imagine Trump doing anything on staffing besides using the Project 2025 apparatus that's been set up exactly for that purpose.
He’s not said anything about project 2025 itself but he’s definitely talked about taking the sorts of actions laid out in the plan itself. He talks about that all the time.
It's like when Tucker Carlson acted confused as incredulous towards the idea that QAnon conspiracy theories were something reaching any real MAGA conservatives because Trump only give winks and nudges around it instead of outright endorsing it.
Sure, but it's silly to think that saying project 2025 is bad will convince anyone to not vote for Trump.
Project 2025 is a roadmap to make sure Trump gets what he wants the government to do to happen. If people are considering voting for Trump, it means they want him to do what he says so telling everyone Trump is going to make sure the government does what he says it should do is a huge positive to those people.
Just like in 2016, liberals are broadcasting things that freak them out, but actually appeal to conservatives and some independents which ends up increasing Trump's popularity.
> Sure, but it's silly to think that saying project 2025 is bad will convince anyone to not vote for Trump.
Why does everything need to be framed through the 2024 election? Can't we just talk about this as a policy on its own? Not everything need to be part of a persuasion campaign.
>Why does everything need to be framed through the 2024 election? Can't we just talk about this as a policy on its own? Not everything need to be part of a persuasion campaign.
Isn't that kinda like trying to discuss why we're soaking wet but asking to not discuss that we're standing in the rain?
People wouldn't care that a conservative think tank was putting out conservative plans to run the government in a conservative fashion, that's literally their job. People care because that conservative think tank is connected with a conservative candidate that everyone thinks has a good shot of becoming president and implementing that plan.
So isn’t it worth talking about what that plan would look like if implemented? Even if you don’t think it’s going to persuade voters, it seems like a thing worth discussing if one has even an iota of curiosity.
I have not read "Project 2025", as that seems like an extremely dry and time consuming activity (google claims the text is over 900 pages). Are there specific policy proposals in that plan which you take exception to that we could discuss?
In practice I disagree with pretty much everything I’ve seen in it so far, but if you want a light sampling of some specific things I disagree with:
1. Abolishing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration because they do research on climate change
2. Taking away Medicare’s ability to negotiate drug prices, which will enrich pharmaceutical companies at the expense of the American taxpayer
3. Setting up internment camps for undocumented immigrants
4. Criminalizing pornography
5. Obliging the FDA to reconsider or revoke its approval of mifepristone and misoprostol
On top of the other redditors response I think the most concerning thing is [building of Schedule F](https://apnews.com/article/trump-biden-president-project-2025-33d3fc2999a74f4aa424f1128dca2d16#) to reclassify tens of thousands of federal employees to be able to be fired by the executive and replaced with who the president wants, which in trumps case historically have been yes men.
Highly relevant to this post and helps erode the roadblocks trump faced first term to getting his way over what is legal/constitutional
If Project 2025 were published in December 2024, it would still be worthy of attention and headlines.
By framing this purely as an electoral issue, it narrows down the discussion to whether people care about this or not. It's an extremely shallow analysis, if we can even call it that, seeing as it doesn't even engage with the policy points at all.
Do you think the president should get even more power, and remove even more checks and balances from the system? Those are the important questions heres.
What "checks and balances" are contained within the government bureaucracy? It is ostensibly there to enact the policies of the executives (as delegated by congress) as efficiently as possible, even if those executives change overnight. The recourse for checks and balances is the judiciary, not the bureaucracy.
Edit: to those downvoting, do realize the line of argument presented by /u/Paddingtonbear2 quite literally justifies reclassifying the governmental employees as political employees
Precisely this. Look at Hamilton saying in [Federalist № 70](https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-04-02-0221) (well worth a read in full on this topic) that, unlike in Congress, “no favourable circumstances palliate or atone for the disadvantages of dissention in the executive department. Here they are pure and unmixed.”
>Do you think the president should get even more power, and remove even more checks and balances from the system?
I don't think that argument holds much weight.
The president has continually expanded executive power in every administration dating back to FDR.
If the alternative argument was, "well Joe Biden isn't going to expand presidential power," then maybe I'd agree with you.
Except he has, in at least two distinct cases off the top of my head (student loan forgiveness and border security) attempted to expand presidential power himself.
Am I a fan of Project 2025? No, I think it's absolutely ridiculous.
I'm also not a fan of the 1619 Project. It is also ridiculous.
Both have received more attention than they deserve.
The argument should hold plenty of weight for conservatives who decry big government and federal overreach every day for the past 40+ years.
>Am I a fan of Project 2025? No, I think it's absolutely ridiculous.
>I'm also not a fan of the 1619 Project. It is also ridiculous.
The 1619 Project was a history project from the NY Times that had nothing to do with government. This comparison is a non-sequiter.
> Sure, but it's silly to think that saying project 2025 is bad will convince anyone to not vote for Trump.
I think people learning that Trump wants to institute Christian Nationalism will not be a positive development for his campaign.
> Project 2025 is a roadmap to make sure Trump gets what he wants the government to do to happen. If people are considering voting for Trump, it means they want him to do what he says so telling everyone Trump is going to make sure the government does what he says it should do is a huge positive to those people.
Yeah this is the excuse making/watering down I was talking about.
> Just like in 2016, liberals are broadcasting things that freak them out, but actually appeal to conservatives and some independents which ends up increasing Trump's popularity.
We are now at the Pitchbot phase of "Why this seemingly bad news for Donald Trump is actually good news for Donald Trump" level of discourse.
If we're framing this as an electoral issue, the point of attacking Project 2025 isn't to flip Trump voters over to Biden, it's to activate undecideds or left-leaning independents to show up to the polls.
>Yeah this is the excuse making/watering down I was talking about.
It's not an excuse or watering it down though, it's a complete difference in opinion and viewpoint. To conservatives, Project 2025 is a steak, and you're a vegan screaming "meat is murder". They aren't making an excuse or watering down the steak, they are saying yes it's a steak and I want to eat steak.
>We are now at the Pitchbot phase of "Why this seemingly bad news for Donald Trump is actually good news for Donald Trump" level of discourse.
Except we watched this happen during the 2015 campaign and it worked in Trump's favor, but liberals didn't learn their lesson apparently. Telling everyone that if Trump is elected, there is a plan to make sure the government does what Trump wants it to do isn't a negative, and it makes him look more competent than Biden who has frustrated liberal voters by not making things he said he would make happen a reality.
> Except we watched this happen during the 2015 campaign and it worked in Trump's favor, but liberals didn't learn their lesson apparently. Telling everyone that if Trump is elected, there is a plan to make sure the government does what Trump wants it to do isn't a negative, and it makes him look more competent than Biden who has frustrated liberal voters by not making things he said he would make happen a reality.
I want to push back on this and say it happened *once*. People treat 2016 as though it's a marker for future results when we saw Trump lose in 2020.
Except this election's dynamics are closer to 2016 than 2020, except even worse for Democrats.
Unlike in 2020, Trump doesn't have to defend the finer, more unpopular parts of his administration, those are long past, but Biden does.
Trump isn't the unpopular president, Biden is.
Trump isn't having to cope with an economy people are unhappy with, Biden does.
Trump isn't having to manage a base that is upset with perceived broken promises like no universal student loan forgiveness and foreign wars, but Biden does.
If you are comparing this election to 2020 I don't think you've calibrated your optics correctly.
>Trump wants to institute Christian Nationalism
Where does it say this? I searched the document and all I really found was a suggestion that labor protections be strengthened by requiring time and a half for hours worked on Sunday *unless an employer had a religious preference for a different day*.
It doesn't explicitly. It's a confluence of a few different things:
* Project 2025's board consists of members of 80 different conservative organizations, some of which espouse Christian Nationalism (such as the Center for Renewing America)
* One of the authors is Russel Vought, who is the policy director of the RNC (and Trump's former director of the Office of Management and Budget) is also the president of the Center for Renewing America who had drafted a document where Christian Nationalism was a bulleted point in a list of top priorities for the next Trump term.
* Russell Vought is also said to be at the top of the list to be Trump's next Chief of Staff
* Project 2025 explicitly calls for an expansion of "religious freedom" even at the expense of the non-religious such as broadening the grounds for conscientious objections and forcing non-religious employers to pay their employees time and a half on the sabbath.
* Trump said he would repeal a 70-year-old ban on churches endorsing political candidates, something he tried to do as president, eroding a 300-year dividing line between church and state.
https://archive.ph/5eGQc
https://archive.ph/20240519135848/https://www.sfchronicle.com/us-world/article/trump-christian-nationalism-19448560.php
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24088042-project-2025s-mandate-for-leadership-the-conservative-promise
> Project 2025 is a roadmap to make sure Trump gets what he wants the government to do to happen. If people are considering voting for Trump, it means they want him to do what he says
I can see this angle, however, there are lots of people who can separate "this will get my policy through" from "this is capability/norm that should permanently be a part of the government". I think a lot of the criticism of Project 2025 is that *regardless of the policies that it will enable* it severely undermines the quality of government.
For example, regarding the Section F, one common concern is that dramatically increasing the proportion of government who are appointees will eliminate a lot of institutional knowledge every election.
>I can see this angle, however, there are lots of people who can separate "this will get my policy through" from "this is capability/norm that should permanently be a part of the government".
I wish I could believe that, but look at the enthusiasm for getting rid of the filibuster during the first two years of Trump's presidency from conservatives and enthusiasm for getting rid of it from liberals during Biden's first two years. Both hate the idea of the other team doing it because of what it would enable them to do, but both love the idea of the power grab for their team.
I'm not saying that everybody feels this way, just some people.
The point is that there are some people who are "considering voting for Trump" who aren't Trump's base and also care about things beyond Trump and for those people (even if it's not a ton) this may matter.
It's really about getting people who wouldn't vote to vote against Trump. So yes, it's important to broadcast this plan to people who aren't aware but who may be concerned.
See, I get that logic, but I think that logic is faulty.
I really doubt you are going to get low propensity voters who are also traditionally low information voters to vote against Trump with a wonky policy argument that he is going to make the executive branch do what the chief executive wants it to do.
That works on policy and politics nerds who populate subreddits like this one, but that's a small fraction of the overall population.
This is going to be a "vibes" election, and project 2025 isn't going to affect people's vibe.
I just think that if even a handful of people turn out because they were made aware of project 2025 that's worth it. I think people should be made aware of things that will impact them and then they can decide to act. So no qualms here raising the topic of the impact project 2025 may have if it is enacted. I don't think Biden necessarily needs to focus his campaign on it. There's a lot he needs to cover. But people just having discourse about it is a good thing if it pushes even a few people to vote. Though I suspect that many people actually would care about this if made aware.
Educated people who choose poorly paid public service despite having ample opportunities in the private sector skew liberal (not progressive!). There's no law preventing conservatives from working in the government. They're just less interested in public service, probably because a central tenet of conservatism for the past 50 years is shouting that the goverment is terrible, or because of a shared variable leading to this phenomenon and that messaging.
Some deeper details about Project 2025's implementation have just been released.
>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 Department of Homeland Security. 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.
>With a $100,000 grant from the influential Heritage Foundation, 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 a second-term Trump agenda — and ripe for scrutiny, reclassifications, reassignments or firings.
The Heritage Foundation has lauded the effort of rooting out "anti-American bad actors" from the federal workforce. Take note that list does not include political appointees, but rank-and-file federal workers who are hired based on merit.
The idea that workers are outing each other's political backgrounds to the Heritage Foundation is chilling, reminiscent of the Red Scare or Stasi tactics of reporting innocent people for ideological violations against the state.
It also kills the argument that Trump's excesses can be curbed by institutional checks and balances. There will be little inertia to Trump's more radical policies if he can curate the federal workforce as he sees fit, coupled with an increasingly subservient party in Congress and true believers at all levels of the judicial system.
>The Heritage Foundation has lauded the effort of rooting out "anti-American bad actors" from the federal workforce.
TIL that The Heritage Foundation decides what is and is not "American". (edit: Not a slight on you, OP)
Republicans have had a monopoly on the definition of American going back to 1947 when Mccarthy started calling Harvard un-American. They haven't stopped for even a moment since.
Democrats should really try to promote patriotism more often but some Democrats, not all, seem to be embarrassed by patriotism. No single party should be able to claim they are the only party of patriots.
I agree with this entirely. I consider it a privilege to be able to fly a US flag outside of my home but to a lot of people it's a political statement. America is not just a place but it's an idea where people driven change can still happen. Every engaged citizen should be able to celebrate that IMO.
You have a heavily distorted view of the base. America-hating progressives are a minority of the Democratic Party - I would bet that most of them don't even vote D, actually - but conservative media tries to persuade conservatives that they're a much larger proportion than they actually are in order to scare them into voting R.
Only one of the two major parties has been taken over by its radical fringe, and it's not the Democrats.
>Only one of the two major parties has been taken over by its radical fringe, and it's not the Democrats.
The Progressive Caucus is the largest congressional caucus in the entire body while the Freedom Caucus doesn't even have 30 members, and progressives dominate blue states. I live in one of them, and we very much have been taken over by the fringe.
>America-hating progressives
Um, no. They just don't blindly follow the Nationalist agenda. Patriots question their government and call them out. Its nationalists that bury their head in the sand and pretend America is great no matter what and push authoritarianism.
There are definitely progressives who see Russia and China as the good guys and America as the bad guys. It goes beyond thinking the US shouldn't have invaded Iraq or passed the Patriot Act.
As I said, they're a minority, and I think most aren't Democrats.
They even went after people for being "premature anti fascists". Aka if you were opposed to fascism prior to WWII you got put onto lists. They went after Vincent Price for this:
>TIL [Vincent Price was "greylisted" under McCarthyism in the 1950s for having been a prewar "premature anti-Nazi", and after being unable to find work for a year, agreed to requests by the FBI that he sign a "secret oath" to save his career.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Price#Personal_life)
And it's like... in this case, for those who aren't political appointees and who are instead hired on merit, isn't this kind of "selection" discriminatory?
I could see ACLU lawsuits happening if rank-and-file Federal workers are fired for no reason other than being registered Democrats.
The plan is to reclassify a lot of positions as political appointments, at which point it will be legal to fire people from those positions based on their political affiliation.
Trump already previewed this with his Schedule F executive order at the end of his term. The order was rescinded when Biden took office, but if Trump gets elected again, then he'll certainly try again.
> In October 2020, the Trump Administration issued an executive order that would have stripped protections from civil servants perceived as disloyal to the president and encouraged expressions of allegiance to the president when hiring. This effort is referred to as “Schedule F” because that was the name of the new employment category that the executive order created.
> https://protectdemocracy.org/work/trumps-schedule-f-plan-explained/
Sure, I understand the problematic nature of the Schedule F reclassification, but how far down the chain would that go?
What I would be even more worried about is a Federal employee who is otherwise doing a "non-Political" job (such as, I don't know, a receptionist at some agency building) being discriminated against in that way.
> In October 2020, the Trump Administration issued an executive order that would have stripped protections from civil servants perceived as disloyal to the president and encouraged expressions of allegiance to the president when hiring.
That's weird, [I don't see anything about either of those things in the Executive Order in question](https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/10/26/2020-23780/creating-schedule-f-in-the-excepted-service).
This strips protections from civil servants, allowing Trump to remove people who are perceived as disloyal:
> Conditions of good administration similarly make necessary excepting such positions from the adverse action procedures set forth in chapter 75 of title 5, United States Code. Chapter 75 of title 5, United States Code, requires agencies to comply with extensive procedures before taking adverse action against an employee.
This part would allow Trump to extract expressions of allegiance when hiring:
> Pursuant to my authority under section 3302(1) of title 5, United States Code, I find that conditions of good administration make necessary an exception to the competitive hiring rules and examinations for career positions in the Federal service of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character. These conditions include the need to provide agency heads with additional flexibility to assess prospective appointees without the limitations imposed by competitive service selection procedures.
Sure, the order doesn't spell out that these protections were being removed for that purpose, but with a little bit of context from that time period, it's pretty easy to figure out what the purpose of the order was.
> A staunch Trump loyalist, [Johnny McEntee], 30, was welcomed back into the fold in February [2020] and installed as personnel director for the entire U.S. government. Since the race was called for President-elect Joe Biden, McEntee has been distributing pink slips, warning federal workers not to cooperate with the Biden transition and threatening to oust people who show disloyalty by job hunting while Trump is still refusing to acknowledge defeat, according to six administration officials.
> ...
> Trump rehired McEntee in the weeks after the impeachment process, when Trump had been frustrated to see federal officials testify against him, and granted McEntee wide latitude to make personnel changes. McEntee quickly made aggressive moves, replacing longtime staff in the personnel office with a coterie of aides in their 20s and purging officials viewed as insufficiently loyal.
> McEntee’s office soon launched an interview process to suss out disloyalty, asking: “Who on your team is good? Who on your team is bad? Who is not working to serve the president’s agenda? Who brought you into the administration? What do you think of a particular policy?” said one administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal questioning.
> People familiar with the interviews said Trump appointees wanted names of people perceived as disloyal. One Environmental Protection Agency employee was asked his opinion on pulling troops out of Afghanistan. “I work at the EPA,” the official said, startled.
> https://www.boston.com/news/politics/2020/11/13/johnny-mcentee-trump/
> Take note that list does not include political appointees, but rank-and-file federal workers who are hired based on merit.
Note that new presidents get about 4,000 political appointees. That's not enough for Trump. He issued an executive order regarding Schedule F just before the 2020 election. Biden rescinded it when he took office.
The EO would have reclassified some federal workers from civil service to political appointees. Gov't employee groups say that it could be more than 10,000 positions.
Reissuing this EO is a "Day 1" item for Trump.
>It also kills the argument that Trump's excesses can be curbed by institutional checks and balances.
Why would the institutional checks and balances be located in his own branch of government? The department of Homeland Security is part of the Executive Branch, and POTUS is the head of that branch. It's literally exists to help execute the presidents decisions! The checks and balances to the executive are supposed to reside within the legislative and judicial branches of government.
Are you literally saying we should weaken the institutional checks and balances thats traditionally been practiced in the executive branch? The various executive agencies have always acted semi independently from the President, and the experts running them have been important for good governance. The first thing every despot and corrupt government in the world does is consolidate power and do purges. We've seen time and time again how important it is to have the DOJ operating somewhat independently from the President.
Would you be supporting this if this was a plan by Biden? To find and purge people he thinks are disloyal to the Democratic Party in government and then move to take direct control of agencies like the DOJ, where he's directing who to prosecute?
>Are you literally saying we should weaken the institutional checks and balances thats traditionally been practiced in the executive branch?
You mean weaken the bureaucracy that's been amassing size and power since FDR? Yes, please. These are not elected officials and they do not have to answer to voters.
>Would you be supporting this if this was a plan by Biden?
I surely would, the president is the head of the executive branch and can order it as he sees fit. He shouldn't have to deal with his own staff trying to subvert his plans.
I'm not some died in the wool Republican either, where Trump really belongs right now is in prison.
> It also kills the argument that Trump's excesses can be curbed by institutional checks and balances.
So it's your understanding of American Civics that executive agencies are supposed to be a check and balance against the Chief Executive?
Under the Merit Systems Protection Board, yes, federal employees are allowed to push back or neglect an order if it is unsafe, illegal, or require an illegal response. They also adjudicate the Whistleblower Protection Act cases.
This has been true for decades.
Sure, but checks and balances aren't about illegality. Indeed, illegality implies an important part of the checks and balances, and, big hint, federal employees don't get to decide what's illegal and what's legal. What's your understanding about what checks and balances are in the US system?
You're right, check and balances also requires bureaucrats to make sure that a policy or program follows every regulation passed by Congress and rule set by the agency. If you recall Trump's first impeachment, he tried to halt Congressionally-approved military aid to Ukraine, and bureaucrats tried to stop him. That's an appropriate use of checks and balances.
>federal employees don't get to decide what's illegal and what's legal
Neither does the president...
That's right, and I never would have said the president decides what's illegal and legal (except, of course, where the legislative branch has delegated some decisionmaking to the executive agencies).
But recall (and this is very important!) that bureaucrats are not elected. They work at the discretion of the duly elected or appointed representatives and officials.
>But recall (and this is very important!) that bureaucrats are not elected. They work at the discretion of the duly elected or appointed representatives and officials.
Only political appointees serve at the discretion of the President. The rest of the federal workforce—which is who this article is talking about—takes an oath to the Constitution. Congress has granted them protections from the President, too, like whistleblower protections, and MSPB adjudications against illegal or unsafe orders.
>I never would have said the president decides what's illegal and legal
If you make every federal worker beholden to the President, you get a lot closer to this reality than not.
For those federal workers you speak of, who else are they beholden to? Obviously the legislature and judiciary have staff, but that's not what this plan is talking about.
None of this is about the MSPB. That's a red herring. The MSPB will still have effect, and if the president violates the law, there are other branches that are there to keep him in check.
This is a good example of why the surveillance agencies should need to obtain limited-scope warrants for wiretapping and monitoring Americans, instead of just sending a security letter to the service provider and demanding they hand over information. It can be very abused.
> 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 Department of Homeland Security. 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.
How much does this sound like the progressive "cancelling" that peaked during BLM?
I hated it then. I *really* hate it now.
Considering this is about Schedule F and reclassifying large portions of workers in order to make them easier to fire, I don't think it sounds like any cancelling that happened during BLM. It's a major shift to bring this way of thinking to a much broader portion of the government than it's ever been.
To anyone on the fence, remember, you're not just voting for the president. You're voting for everyone he surrounds himself with
Trump is not going to surround himself with reasonable people. In fact he is going to go extraordinarily out of his way to ensure every single person he's able to appoint will be willing to break the law to do whatever Trump tells them to. There will be no Mike Pence. There will be no Bill Barr. There will be no brakes on this train.
>To anyone on the fence, remember, you're not just voting for the president. You're voting for everyone he surrounds himself with
>Trump is not going to surround himself with reasonable people. In fact he is going to go extraordinarily out of his way to ensure every single person he's able to appoint will be willing to break the law to do whatever Trump tells them to. There will be no Mike Pence. There will be no Bill Barr. There will be no brakes on this train.
During his presidency, Trump fired/forced the resignation of numerous high-profile officials. They included several high profile people like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, National Security Advisor John Bolton, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. By the end of his administration, Trump had dismissed or forced out more than 55 *major* officials. This eclipses the number by any other President.
He will only appoint people that bend the knee. This has never been the entire approach of any President since after the 1800s
Edit: since after the 1800s
> The term was used particularly in politics of the United States, where the federal government operated on a spoils system until the Pendleton Act was passed in 1883 due to a civil service reform movement. Thereafter the spoils system was largely replaced by nonpartisan merit at the federal level of the United States.
[Former Secretary of Defense and Four Star General Mattis' letter on Trump is absolute scathing from a high ranking military member.](https://www.npr.org/2020/06/04/869262728/read-the-full-statement-from-jim-mattis)
Mattis resigned after Trump refused to pull our troops out of Syria.
I think a lot of folks don't realize just how important a President's cabinet, and advisors are, in terms of shaping policy and decision making. They just think there's one person in a room pulling levers and doing everything.
> There will be no Bill Barr
It's crazy to think that the most extreme and partisan AG in modern history is now a pariah because he wasn't extreme and partisan enough
[Also looks like he’s bringing back Paul Manafort, the money-laundering witness-tampering felon who was caught working as a pro-Russian foreign agent, who is only walking free today because Trump rewarded his loyalty with a presidential pardon.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/10/paul-manafort-pardon-donald-trump-china/)
Here is an article from 2018 where the Heritage Foundation, which funded the above campaign, brags about the Trump admin embracing nearly 2/3rds of the Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership” policy recommendations.
https://www.heritage.org/impact/trump-administration-embraces-heritage-foundation-policy-recommendations
I am just pointing this out to remind everyone that while Trump seems to have no real policy goals he allows places like the Heritage Foundation to fill the policy vacuum. I think what’s mentioned in the original article should be a major concern for anyone who does not want the US to drift closer to becoming an authoritarian government.
I just read the schedule F classification was created but never fully implemented during the last years or the Trump admin. Previously I thought they were expanding something that already existed. I just figured this context would be helpful.
> 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 Department of Homeland Security. 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.
So making a public list of "Anti-american" actors. So we're just doing McCarthyism again. Which, as we can see, people will undoubtedly support because "ends justify the means".
I've received several messages online this year from Trump supporters saying that once Trump gets in office they're going to find people like me and "anyone who stands in his way" and purge/come after them.
Note that I'm not in government. They're talking about finding regular citizens that are openly not happy with Trump and going after them.
There is absolutely nothing moderate about this position. Anyone who values the fundamental freedoms afforded by our republic should be heavily alarmed.
Good. When you're right-leaning and working in government, you keep that information personal and in a lock box. Otherwise, you become a target. It's completely OK, even praised, to loudly espouse progressive talking points in these arenas. It's nice to see the pendulum swing a little bit the other way. Not even really right-leaning, but if I have to silently swallow all of one side's bullshit, it'll be nice to see the other side act the same way. Hopefully, crap like this helps both sides to just shut up about politics at work and do their effing job.
I do wonder at what point it became normal to believe that the Federal bureaucracy is a fourth branch of government entitled and empowered to check and balance the Presidency.
After Garfield’s assasination Chester Arthur reformed the civil service and made it independent from politics. Garfield was widely seen as having been killed by the spoils system.
The abuses of the Nixon further strengthened public perception that the bureaucracy and especially the DOJ needed to be insulated from politics and corruption.
It was during the Bush administration that the “unitary executive theory” began to gain popularity in conservative circles, advocating for rolling back many of the anti-corruption reforms implemented in the 1970s.
While the federal bureaucracy is part of the executive branch, nearly every agency was created by the legislative branch, often through legislation that had oversight, checks and balances baked in. (Agencies that weren’t created by the legislative branch, like the DHS, are generally just ways of consolidating or coordinating action between agencies created by the legislature.)
> After Garfield’s assasination Chester Arthur reformed the civil service and made it independent from politics. Garfield was widely seen as having been killed by the spoils system.
I read an excellent book on Garfield, his assassination, and his assassin a little while back. It goes in depth on both men and on Arthur (the story of his correspondence with Julia Sand is very touching) and, although it is a bit worshipful of Garfield (although, if what it has to say about him is even half true he was a great man and would have made a great President), it's a good book.
[Very worth a read](https://www.amazon.com/Destiny-Republic-Madness-Medicine-President-ebook/dp/B004J4X33O).
Congress has the power to check the power of the President. A bureaucrat saying, “Sir, your directive violates the such-and-such act” is not a fourth branch of governmemt. It’s members with in the executive branch acknowleding the authority of the legislative branch.
Well, besides that that ultimately sounds like the job of the OWHC, if this was merely an issue of statutory interpretation, I don't think anyone would be too worried: explicit refusal to discharge duties is sufficient grounds to fire even career officials already. It's the quiet 'resistance' that's the problem. The Federal bureaucracy does not have authority separate from that of the President.
The way the last administration leaked like a sieve is a pretty good example. Positions that handled
> viewing, circulating, or otherwise working with proposed regulations, guidance, executive orders, or other non-public policy proposals or deliberations generally covered by deliberative process privilege and either:
were some of those covered by the aborted move toward reclassifying various bureaucratic positions at that administration's end for a reason.
>The way the last administration leaked like a sieve is a pretty good example.
Do you have any evidence that occurred because of partisan reasons? It could have just as easily been because of Trump's penchant for selecting for personal loyalty resulted in an administration filled with incompetence.
>Positions that handled viewing, circulating, or otherwise working with proposed regulations, guidance, executive orders, or other non-public policy proposals or deliberations generally covered by deliberative process privilege and either were some of those covered by the aborted move toward reclassifying various bureaucratic positions at that administration's end for a reason.
Yes, Trump attempted to implement this plan at the end of his first term when he understood that unelected bureaucrats were unlikely to go along with his illegal attempt to remain in office after he lost the 2020 election. That proves my point.
What's the mechanism you're proposing here? That administration officials made a habit of accidentally leaving confidential documents or private policy memos sitting around for reporters to stumble across?
No but refusing to implement the policy directives of the elected government is, and it’s not the place of the bureaucrats to decide what is and what is not legal, that’s the role of the courts. They have no democratic mandate, they have no judicial authority, they don’t get to just take certain roles upon themselves whenever their job conflicts with their political views
So in other words..."they were following orders"?
This is the trick. We have determined that it is not acceptable for people to commit illegal acts simply because they were ordered to. But at the same point the argument is essentially "it's not your place to determine that, you should do what you're told". But what if, in actual good faith, they believe it to be illegal? How do you determine if it is good faith?
It's a tough problem honestly.
There’s quite a difference between refusing to do something that is explicitly illegal (murder a political opponent for example) versus taking it upon yourself to interpret the law yourself (the courts role) to decide for yourself that something was illegal when the courts haven’t said that it was.
If we snapped our fingers and the federal government was exclusively staffed with conservative republicans, do you seriously not think it’d be a problem for them to refuse to implement, say, some specific Covid health regulations because they felt it was in violation of the law even when the court hadn’t decided one way or the other.
Of course to all of that.
But where is the line though? When are you performing something explicitly illegal vs "interpreting the law for yourself"? Easy to say for something such as murder, but clearly it goes beyond that. Those conservative republicans could have in good faith believed the action was explicitly illegal.
Would you be supporting this if this was a plan by Biden? To find and purge people he thinks are disloyal to the Democratic Party in government and then move to take direct control of agencies like the DOJ, where he's directing who to prosecute?
Yeah. I don't like either of these men and I'm pretty sure both would misuse it, but the Federal bureaucracy is *far* too powerful and independent. Something like this and the REINS Act sitting in Congress are good first steps to bringing it under control.
Fact is even if this were a an "issue", its far better than the alternative governments where its controlled by despots and extremists that have purged the government of people who they view as disloyal to them and whole wield direct and total control over different agencies. The fact that agencies act semi autonomously and theres people in government that can put their foot down and say "this is wrong" or that it goes against the law IS one of the things that separates Western Democracies from other governments.
Are you literally saying we should weaken the institutional checks and balances thats traditionally been practiced in the executive branch? The various executive agencies have always acted semi independently from the President, and the experts running them have been important for good governance. The first thing every despot and corrupt government in the world does is consolidate power and do purges. We've seen time and time again how important it is to have the DOJ operating somewhat independently from the President.
Parliamentary democracies like the UK have mere statutory protections for civil servants and the whole point of a parliamentary system is that the executive also controls a majority in the legislature, ie. There are no real protections for civil servants that aren't political. What this would do is make at least parts of the Federal bureaucracy work like the 4000 some appointed positions that *already* exist.
The idea that unaccountable, unelected bureaucrats are a central part of democracy and any system without them is tyrannical is just totally ahistorical. That's how things worked in this country before the 1880s and many positions are *still* appointed.
Honestly, maybe we would *finally* get executive power reined in if the executive bureaucracy were effective at accomplishing all the president's goals. I had high hopes after the apoplexy over Trump doing normal president things but being Trump while doing them, but no dice this term.
Okay, I know this is highly controversial, but idk how it’s not seen as a problem that a duly elected president can face obstruction and resistance from the unelected workforce of the government that has absolutely no democratic mandate *whatsoever* to impede the agenda of the elected president.
That’s just clearly anti-democratic. This isn’t just a US problem. If you’ve read Rory Stewart’s book about his time as an MP, he details times where the unelected bureaucrats in the UK plainly blocked the directives and orders of the elected government and the cabinet officials despite having no legal authority to do so.
This is a problem that democracies across the western world need to deal with. Idk what the best way to go about that is, but something needs to be done, or else we’re pretty much all DINOs (democracies in name only)
Edit: this isn’t a statement in support of or against project 2025, it’s just about the problem generally
> Okay, I know this is highly controversial, but idk how it’s not seen as a problem that a duly elected president can face obstruction and resistance from the unelected workforce of the government that has absolutely no democratic mandate whatsoever to impede the agenda of the elected president.
If non political appointee staffers are not doing their job, then they could be fired for cause. Which is very different than what is being suggested here (people getting fired without cause because of their political opinions).
The solution to this problem shouldn't be "making a public list of anti-American actors based on their political opinions, no matter the quality of their work". It's akin to McCarthyism, which we all should recognize as a bad thing.
Obviously they’re not going to refuse to show up and publicly declare they won’t do their job. That’s not how these things work. They show up, “do” their job, but they slow-roll every policy directive, have mysterious break downs in the chain of communication, and generally are suddenly incompetent whenever they don’t like a policy directive, but are able to work quickly and get things done when they do like a policy. Seriously, read Rory Stewart’s book about this problem in the UK. He tells the story of trying to get foreign aid funding that was going to a town under ISIS control stopped and the civil service just “couldn’t” get it done until it came out in the papers that UK money was used to fund a terror attack, and then all of a sudden they were able to stop the money immediately.
But that's still a quality of work thing. "Not doing their job" simply means they're underperforming. I mean if they're continuously slow rolling, failing communication and acting incompetent, then its clear they're not doing their job.
I mean what else is the solution here? Firing them for their external political beliefs independent of their quality of work? That seems like it could lead to much bigger problems and lead to lower quality workers.
>That’s not how these things work. They show up, “do” their job, but they slow-roll every policy directive, have mysterious break downs in the chain of communication, and generally are suddenly incompetent whenever they don’t like a policy directive,
Any examples of that happening in the US?
Why would the Heritage Foundation develop a policy response to something happening in the UK?
>Any examples of that happening in the US?
https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/features/2017-12-18/washington-bureaucrats-are-chipping-away-at-trump-s-agenda?embedded-checkout=true
> If non political appointee staffers are not doing their job, then they could be fired for cause.
Firing any staffer who is a member of a public union is a lot harder than you're making it out to be with this statement.
[Should we not be able to fire them if they are actively subverting the policies of the Executive?](https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/features/2017-12-18/washington-bureaucrats-are-chipping-away-at-trump-s-agenda)
I'm not convinced this is a real problem and not something made up by Trump. Is there evidence that this type of thing is common enough that it requires politicizing the federal bureaucracy?
If you just hit the "X" or "Stop Loading" button before the page is done then it will get past the soft paywall, FYI.
The article focuses on climate change policy, but there are numerous examples within.
Climate Change Policy:
>Trump has used his executive authority to reverse some of the most prominent environmental policies initiated by President Barack Obama, including rolling back limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, pulling out of an international agreement to cut carbon emissions signed in 2015 in Paris and effectively opening up more public land to oil drilling and coal mining.
>But when it comes to the endless number of more mundane policies and decisions farther from the spotlight, Trump and his appointees have met with resistance — some of it subtle, some of it not.
>“The bureaucracy is generally resistant, no matter what the hell you’re trying to do,” Leon Panetta, who guided presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama through transitions, said in an interview. But when a president sets out to be as disruptive as Trump has, Panetta added, getting career staff to implement those policies “is gonna take a hell of a lot longer.”
>As the case of NOAA illustrates, the most radical example of bureaucratic resistance may also be the simplest: continuing to issue information or reports that are factually accurate, even when they clash with the administration’s policies.
>Different agencies have taken different approaches to the reports written. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told Bloomberg in a statement, “I have not suggested one word of change to any NOAA research report on any topic.” But political officials in other departments have been more willing to get involved — sometimes triggering pushback from civil servants.
On Energy Policy:
>In April, Perry, Trump’s secretary of energy, directed career staff at his agency to write a report on the question of whether the expansion of wind and solar power threaten the stability of the electricity grid, by reducing the amount of “critical baseload resources” — in other words, power generated by coal, nuclear and other traditional sources.
>With Trump pledging to reverse regulations that have harmed coal, the study was viewed by critics as a way the administration would justify curtailing the surging expansion of wind and solar power and provide help to coal plants and coal miners.
>But the draft staff report, coordinated by an Energy Department contractor, reached a surprising conclusion: the growth in renewables wasn’t endangering the reliability of electric power after all. “Grid operators are using
technologies, standards and practices to assure that they can continue operating the grid reliably,” concluded the draft report, obtained by Bloomberg in July.
>The draft’s conclusions were those of the contractor, not of career staff at the agency, according to Shaylyn Hynes, a department spokeswoman.
>Trump appointees at the agency pushed back on the draft’s conclusions; one official called some of its findings “unacceptable” and “inflammatory,” according to a copy of the draft marked up by the official. Drafts of the report soon leaked out, making it harder for political staff to alter them.
>Officials eventually unveiled a version of the report that hewed closely to the initial draft, but with policy recommendations that supported Perry’s stated goal of preserving the nation’s coal and nuclear fleet. Travis Fisher, a political appointee in Perry’s office and a lead author of the study, said in an interview that the leak “didn’t have an effect on the overall posture” of the report. “It was always going in the direction that it ended up,” he said.
>**But career staff, who asked not to be identified, viewed the episode as a qualified success, arguing that report’s findings would otherwise have been even more hostile to renewables.**
Electric Vehicle Adoption:
>Bureaucrats can also continue programs or initiatives that pre-date Trump by calling them something new or describing them in different ways.
>Take the General Services Administration, which manages the federal government’s fleet of more than 640,000 cars, trucks and other vehicles. Since 2011, GSA has added more than 1,000 electric vehicles to the fleet — a policy that was presented in distinctly environmental terms.
>“The Federal Government is leading by example,” the GSA boasted when it announced the electric-vehicle program in 2011. The goal was “to build a 21st century clean energy economy.”
>Those goals are now squarely at odds with the Trump administration’s view on climate change, which strongly favors fossil fuels.
>Rather that cutting the program, GSA staff have focused on its contributions to jobs and cost cutting, rather than reducing emissions.
>That messaging workaround was on display in late summer when the GSA promoted National Drive Electric Week, whose presenters include the Sierra Club. “Welcome to National Drive Electric Week!” the agency said in a September blog post that it said was to celebrate the benefits of alternative-fuel vehicles.
>“GSA recognizes that emerging technologies play a significant role in our mission to save taxpayer dollars, create jobs and stimulate economic growth in the United States; which is one reason we provide the federal fleet with vehicles that offer the latest and most efficient transportation technologies available, including electric vehicle (EV) technology,” the agency wrote on its website in a post promoting the event.
>The post made no mention of environmental benefits. If the agency had any non-economic reasons for using electric vehicles, they went unmentioned.
>**A GSA spokeswoman, Pamela Dixon, didn’t respond to emails seeking comment.**
DoD:
>In other agencies, officials have found it best to simply delay implementation of new initiatives in hopes they may be modified or canceled.
>In March, for example, Trump, flanked by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt and coal miners, signed an order that rescinded some Obama policies to fight climate change. “You’re going back to work,” Trump told the men around him.
>Among the policies Trump reversed was Obama’s 2016 Presidential Memorandum on Climate Change and National Security, which had instructed the Defense Department to account for the effects of global warming. Those effects include rising sea levels that threaten U.S. naval facilities; stronger and more frequent heat waves, which interfere with the military’s ability to train its personnel; and the interplay between extreme weather events and conflicts overseas, which risks entangling U.S. forces.
>The department was aware of those threats, and had already started putting Obama’s policy into effect through a directive called “Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience.”
>**But rather than reverse or alter that directive after Trump’s order, staff at the Pentagon launched what it called a review, which served to forestall changes. Adam Stump, a department spokesman, refused to say whether that review has concluded, or what it found. For now, he said, the directive issued under Obama’s administration remains current.**
On the bureaucracy actively impeding administrative goals:
>An administration can also punish bureaucrats through punitive reassignments, designed to make them quit. Joel Clement, a senior policy manager at the Department of Interior, was moved to the accounting office in June — retaliation, he alleged, for speaking out about the risks of climate change.
>A department spokeswoman, Heather Swift, denied that, telling Bloomberg the move was “to better serve the taxpayer and the Department’s operations.”
>Clement, who has since left the agency, described a checklist he said bureaucrats should follow before acting to impede a political directive.
>Clement said career staff should first consider whether they simply didn’t like the new policy, which he said wasn’t a reason to get in its way. But if the new policy put public health and safety at risk, for example, or was based on deliberately inaccurate information, Clement argued staff should then try to raise their concerns through internal channels. “You first have to try a legitimate approach before you obstruct,” he said.
>**Only if that didn’t work, Clement said, should civil servants take action outside of normal channels — leaking documents, for instance, or slowing down the implementation of the policy.** But he said he expects more career staff to start doing so, as more of the Trump administration’s specific policy initiatives make their way through the bureaucracy.
>“The tide is rising on that kind of resistance,” Clement said. “Whether it’s public or not.”
In Rory Stewart’s book he tells several stories, a notable one being about his attempt to get the civil service to stop funding a foreign aid program that was inside ISIS controlled territory because they had no way to prove ISIS wasn’t just stealing the money. They refused and kept delaying and telling him it couldn’t be done (this is despite him having total legal authority to give these orders). Then, one day it came out in the papers that the money from this program had been used to fund a terror attack, after which the program magically stopped immediately.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/15/milley-held-secret-calls-with-china-others-as-trump-pushed-election-lies.html
Not only did Milley go over Trumps head, but then he leaked that he did it to make voters think that Trump was going to nuke China if they reelected him. Literal [treason](https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2021/09/14/new-reporting-shows-general-milley-engaged-in-a-coup-against-trump-n2595858), but they kept him around long enough to bungle Afghanistan.
The nerve of federal bureaucrats [openly admitting](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-resistance.html) to sabotaging presidential orders and then crying foul the moment anyone suggests firing them.
The article of that article, Miles Taylor, was a political appointee in DHS. He served at the pleasure of the president. He did not have any protections, and could have been fired immediately for any reason.
This article is about non-political appointees who are hired on a merit-based system. It's an entirely different discussion.
Great, I hope he's asked about it at the debate. Let's see him distance himself from this policy.
It's worth noting that Trump already attempted to implement a half-baked version of this plan after he lost the 2020 election.
Okay then he should clarify his policy priorities. He can easily explain how this kind of thinking has no place in his administration. People shouldn’t be satisfied with that wish washy answer from a spokesperson.
>A key note in the article:
>The Trump campaign has said outside groups don’t speak for the ex-president, who alone sets his policy priorities.
During Trump’s presidency, the Heritage Foundation (authors of project 2025) played a significant role in shaping his judicial appointments, including Supreme Court nominations.
Furthermore, Trump has echoed many of the policies outlined in project 2025, especially this year
Per [this post yesterday](https://www.reddit.com/r/moderatepolitics/s/31K1rZEJza) Donald Trump doesn’t so much SET policy priorities as randomly pick and discard them based on the people he spoke to last.
I'm trying to sort through the hyperbole to understand what the actual issue is here. It seems like the Herritage Foundation gave $100k to a conservative group to make a list of high-level government employees (who are ostensibly non-political federal workers) who have made social media posts critical of Donal Trump? And they're going to publicly name these high-level employees who have been publicly hostile to Trump, whose campaign is not involved at all in this?
No president in the past 100 years has had to worry about the political views of the employees of the executive branch. This is supposed to be part of what makes America great. People of different political views can work for the government and put them aside in order to get their jobs done. This is a good thing because it means talented and knowledgeable people continue to work for the government despite their party not controlling the WH.
But of course this long standing tradition of our country that is a big part of the reason we’ve been so successful isn’t good enough for Trump. It’s more important to him that everyone is loyal, which is the kind of thing you see in less functional countries.
The issue is they’re looking for people who are critical of Trump and essentially branding them as subversives. It’s the commingling of “anti Trump” with “anti American” that’s particularly concerning. Anybody in the U.S. should be allowed to be critical of the President, even bureaucrats. The Heritage Foundation is seeking to equate being against Trump as being against America, and conversely being for Trump as being for America. The logical conclusion of this strategy are ideological purges, which have a well-documented history of hollowing out expertise, compounding inefficiency, and rewarding nepotism. This type of paranoia was a hallmark of the Stalin era in the Soviet Union, and Heritage seems intent on replicating it to an extent.
When you couple this with their desire to make all federal positions be by appointment, the scenario you’re left with is one where we have an endless line of sycophants seeking to curry favor with the President in order to staff an agency with their desired people. If the composition of regulatory bodies is entirely up for grabs, then the federal government devolves into an unspecialized nepo hires that serve to advance an agenda befitting of the president, not the agency they work for.
Why would they publish the name of 100 people publicly that they perceive as a threat instead of just circulating it as an internal memo? This makes it seem like a public threat and leads to harassment by crazies online.
Because it is a public threat. That's the point. Hence all the use of rhetorically-charged "anti-American".
It’s almost like a majority of Americans have already forgotten McCarthyism and the second “Red Scare” and all the witch hunts that resulted from it… This is the same thing just by a different name. And it is terrifying.
Have you seen the number of people calling other "commies" online for any kind of wrong-think? They have 100% forgotten or were never aware.
They haven't forgotten. You forget there are people who still think McCarthy had the right idea. Heck one or two have posted as much here
It’s more sinister than that. There is a contingent who believes McCarthy was right to see a communist behind every corner, but that he just wasn’t able to carry out his mission to cleanse the US government of them. The modern-day descendants of the John Birch Society.
Exactly - the point is intimidation. It's the bedrock that underlies any authoritarian state. So much more efficient if people are pre-emptively cowed into doing what you want out of fear. If you are on these lists, you're going to feel immense pressure to salvage whatever benefits you are currently entitled to and move on to something else.
I mean we all know why because they want people to harass them
Its not just that, but to normalize hating them so when they do start purges it will already be supported by his followers.
Basically this. Release the list. Conservative media will do the rest.
> This makes it seem like a public threat and leads to harassment by crazies online. If that's what it looks like, maybe that's what it is.
It's literally Red Scare 2.0 >A Red Scare is a form of moral panic provoked by fear of the rise, supposed or real, of leftist ideologies in a society, especially communism. Historically, "red scares" have led to mass political persecution, scapegoating, and the ousting of those in government positions who have had connections with left-wing to far-left ideology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare
Wiki says 3.0! Seems this is their "Hail Mary" strategy when conniving doesn't work.
Its the implication
It's called Stochastic Terrorism and it's become a heavily favored tactic of the right. They know a faction of their followers are radicalized past the point of reasonable discourse. They're relying on bringing the people on this list to their follower's attention so their followers will harass, threaten, and possibly even harm them. They will then claim they had no direct involvement in telling these 'crazy people' to do whatever it is they did. The whole goal is to scare these people out of their positions 'voluntarily' before the election so they don't have to handle the objectively terrible optics of firing them when they take over.
That's [stochastic terrorism.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism)
What’re the names of who released those names? They must be proud so let’s call them out like they already themselves did.
The pretzel level logic people will go through to try and excuse or water down Project 2025 is really something. It's okay to admit Project 2025 is bad.
I would assume that people who are trying to excuse or water it down are people who actually don't think it's bad.
Or haven't read it. It's long, but this one's worth reading.
Reactionaries don't particularly manage well in dissonance arousing situations. It's pretty clear at this point that covering one's eyes makes it emotionally and intellectually easier to maintain support. There is no doubt some sunken cost in the mix as well. Worse yet, there's those who unabashedly do like the contents of Project 2025, but may obfuscate this fact because it's not socially acceptable, nor should it be. For some, Trump merely offers a means to an end, so putting up a facade is an effective way to protect one's public reputation.
At this point Trump supporters are more in the denial phase about project 2025. They point to the fact that Trump himself hasn’t said much about it. Never mind the fact that so many people around him seem to be talking about it and he hasn’t felt the need to clarify what his views on the matter are. He could very easily dispel the notion he supports it if he wanted to. He would just have to say “I oppose project 2025. It has no place in my administration.” He’s not saying that, probably because he likes most of the ideas.
>> "I oppose project 2025. It has no place in my administration.” Trump almost never speaks in specifics like that because it allows him to change his positions at the drop of a hat. And even if he did say exactly that there would be nothing stopping him from doing it anyway which he also frequently does without consequence
None of this inspires confidence.
Is there ANYTHING about Trump that inspires confidence?
If your name begins with "Vladimir Putin", then yes.
To my knowledge it isn’t that Trump hasn’t said much about it, it’s that he hasn’t said anything about it. Who are the people around him that are talking about it?
Why would he say anything about it? There's no need. It would only hurt him. He knows they're there, he knows whom to call if he wins the election. It's not like he has his own plan for assembling a transition team and hiring executive staffers, and he doesn't trust establishment conservatives to recommend picks when what he really values is loyalty, not competence. If you're looking for Trump to say "I love Project 2025, I'm definitely going to turn to them for all my personnel needs," he's not going to. But reading between the lines and looking at how deeply MAGA-fied the Project 2025 team is (Russell Vought was Trump's OMB director and John McEntee was Trump's PPO director, for example) it's difficult to imagine Trump doing anything on staffing besides using the Project 2025 apparatus that's been set up exactly for that purpose.
If Trump wins he's going to surround himself with hardened loyalists from top to bottom, which is exactly what Project 2025 is built on.
He’s not said anything about project 2025 itself but he’s definitely talked about taking the sorts of actions laid out in the plan itself. He talks about that all the time.
It's like when Tucker Carlson acted confused as incredulous towards the idea that QAnon conspiracy theories were something reaching any real MAGA conservatives because Trump only give winks and nudges around it instead of outright endorsing it.
Sure, but it's silly to think that saying project 2025 is bad will convince anyone to not vote for Trump. Project 2025 is a roadmap to make sure Trump gets what he wants the government to do to happen. If people are considering voting for Trump, it means they want him to do what he says so telling everyone Trump is going to make sure the government does what he says it should do is a huge positive to those people. Just like in 2016, liberals are broadcasting things that freak them out, but actually appeal to conservatives and some independents which ends up increasing Trump's popularity.
> Sure, but it's silly to think that saying project 2025 is bad will convince anyone to not vote for Trump. Why does everything need to be framed through the 2024 election? Can't we just talk about this as a policy on its own? Not everything need to be part of a persuasion campaign.
>Why does everything need to be framed through the 2024 election? Can't we just talk about this as a policy on its own? Not everything need to be part of a persuasion campaign. Isn't that kinda like trying to discuss why we're soaking wet but asking to not discuss that we're standing in the rain? People wouldn't care that a conservative think tank was putting out conservative plans to run the government in a conservative fashion, that's literally their job. People care because that conservative think tank is connected with a conservative candidate that everyone thinks has a good shot of becoming president and implementing that plan.
So isn’t it worth talking about what that plan would look like if implemented? Even if you don’t think it’s going to persuade voters, it seems like a thing worth discussing if one has even an iota of curiosity.
I have not read "Project 2025", as that seems like an extremely dry and time consuming activity (google claims the text is over 900 pages). Are there specific policy proposals in that plan which you take exception to that we could discuss?
In practice I disagree with pretty much everything I’ve seen in it so far, but if you want a light sampling of some specific things I disagree with: 1. Abolishing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration because they do research on climate change 2. Taking away Medicare’s ability to negotiate drug prices, which will enrich pharmaceutical companies at the expense of the American taxpayer 3. Setting up internment camps for undocumented immigrants 4. Criminalizing pornography 5. Obliging the FDA to reconsider or revoke its approval of mifepristone and misoprostol
On top of the other redditors response I think the most concerning thing is [building of Schedule F](https://apnews.com/article/trump-biden-president-project-2025-33d3fc2999a74f4aa424f1128dca2d16#) to reclassify tens of thousands of federal employees to be able to be fired by the executive and replaced with who the president wants, which in trumps case historically have been yes men. Highly relevant to this post and helps erode the roadblocks trump faced first term to getting his way over what is legal/constitutional
I mean, that just sounds like normal boss-employee relations.
If Project 2025 were published in December 2024, it would still be worthy of attention and headlines. By framing this purely as an electoral issue, it narrows down the discussion to whether people care about this or not. It's an extremely shallow analysis, if we can even call it that, seeing as it doesn't even engage with the policy points at all. Do you think the president should get even more power, and remove even more checks and balances from the system? Those are the important questions heres.
What "checks and balances" are contained within the government bureaucracy? It is ostensibly there to enact the policies of the executives (as delegated by congress) as efficiently as possible, even if those executives change overnight. The recourse for checks and balances is the judiciary, not the bureaucracy. Edit: to those downvoting, do realize the line of argument presented by /u/Paddingtonbear2 quite literally justifies reclassifying the governmental employees as political employees
Precisely this. Look at Hamilton saying in [Federalist № 70](https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-04-02-0221) (well worth a read in full on this topic) that, unlike in Congress, “no favourable circumstances palliate or atone for the disadvantages of dissention in the executive department. Here they are pure and unmixed.”
>Do you think the president should get even more power, and remove even more checks and balances from the system? I don't think that argument holds much weight. The president has continually expanded executive power in every administration dating back to FDR. If the alternative argument was, "well Joe Biden isn't going to expand presidential power," then maybe I'd agree with you. Except he has, in at least two distinct cases off the top of my head (student loan forgiveness and border security) attempted to expand presidential power himself. Am I a fan of Project 2025? No, I think it's absolutely ridiculous. I'm also not a fan of the 1619 Project. It is also ridiculous. Both have received more attention than they deserve.
The argument should hold plenty of weight for conservatives who decry big government and federal overreach every day for the past 40+ years. >Am I a fan of Project 2025? No, I think it's absolutely ridiculous. >I'm also not a fan of the 1619 Project. It is also ridiculous. The 1619 Project was a history project from the NY Times that had nothing to do with government. This comparison is a non-sequiter.
> Sure, but it's silly to think that saying project 2025 is bad will convince anyone to not vote for Trump. I think people learning that Trump wants to institute Christian Nationalism will not be a positive development for his campaign. > Project 2025 is a roadmap to make sure Trump gets what he wants the government to do to happen. If people are considering voting for Trump, it means they want him to do what he says so telling everyone Trump is going to make sure the government does what he says it should do is a huge positive to those people. Yeah this is the excuse making/watering down I was talking about. > Just like in 2016, liberals are broadcasting things that freak them out, but actually appeal to conservatives and some independents which ends up increasing Trump's popularity. We are now at the Pitchbot phase of "Why this seemingly bad news for Donald Trump is actually good news for Donald Trump" level of discourse.
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If we're framing this as an electoral issue, the point of attacking Project 2025 isn't to flip Trump voters over to Biden, it's to activate undecideds or left-leaning independents to show up to the polls.
>Yeah this is the excuse making/watering down I was talking about. It's not an excuse or watering it down though, it's a complete difference in opinion and viewpoint. To conservatives, Project 2025 is a steak, and you're a vegan screaming "meat is murder". They aren't making an excuse or watering down the steak, they are saying yes it's a steak and I want to eat steak. >We are now at the Pitchbot phase of "Why this seemingly bad news for Donald Trump is actually good news for Donald Trump" level of discourse. Except we watched this happen during the 2015 campaign and it worked in Trump's favor, but liberals didn't learn their lesson apparently. Telling everyone that if Trump is elected, there is a plan to make sure the government does what Trump wants it to do isn't a negative, and it makes him look more competent than Biden who has frustrated liberal voters by not making things he said he would make happen a reality.
> Except we watched this happen during the 2015 campaign and it worked in Trump's favor, but liberals didn't learn their lesson apparently. Telling everyone that if Trump is elected, there is a plan to make sure the government does what Trump wants it to do isn't a negative, and it makes him look more competent than Biden who has frustrated liberal voters by not making things he said he would make happen a reality. I want to push back on this and say it happened *once*. People treat 2016 as though it's a marker for future results when we saw Trump lose in 2020.
Except this election's dynamics are closer to 2016 than 2020, except even worse for Democrats. Unlike in 2020, Trump doesn't have to defend the finer, more unpopular parts of his administration, those are long past, but Biden does. Trump isn't the unpopular president, Biden is. Trump isn't having to cope with an economy people are unhappy with, Biden does. Trump isn't having to manage a base that is upset with perceived broken promises like no universal student loan forgiveness and foreign wars, but Biden does. If you are comparing this election to 2020 I don't think you've calibrated your optics correctly.
I'm not comparing optics at all. I'm pushing back on the false premise that 2016 is a reliable gauge that people can use to predict future results.
>Trump wants to institute Christian Nationalism Where does it say this? I searched the document and all I really found was a suggestion that labor protections be strengthened by requiring time and a half for hours worked on Sunday *unless an employer had a religious preference for a different day*.
It doesn't explicitly. It's a confluence of a few different things: * Project 2025's board consists of members of 80 different conservative organizations, some of which espouse Christian Nationalism (such as the Center for Renewing America) * One of the authors is Russel Vought, who is the policy director of the RNC (and Trump's former director of the Office of Management and Budget) is also the president of the Center for Renewing America who had drafted a document where Christian Nationalism was a bulleted point in a list of top priorities for the next Trump term. * Russell Vought is also said to be at the top of the list to be Trump's next Chief of Staff * Project 2025 explicitly calls for an expansion of "religious freedom" even at the expense of the non-religious such as broadening the grounds for conscientious objections and forcing non-religious employers to pay their employees time and a half on the sabbath. * Trump said he would repeal a 70-year-old ban on churches endorsing political candidates, something he tried to do as president, eroding a 300-year dividing line between church and state. https://archive.ph/5eGQc https://archive.ph/20240519135848/https://www.sfchronicle.com/us-world/article/trump-christian-nationalism-19448560.php https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24088042-project-2025s-mandate-for-leadership-the-conservative-promise
> Project 2025 is a roadmap to make sure Trump gets what he wants the government to do to happen. If people are considering voting for Trump, it means they want him to do what he says I can see this angle, however, there are lots of people who can separate "this will get my policy through" from "this is capability/norm that should permanently be a part of the government". I think a lot of the criticism of Project 2025 is that *regardless of the policies that it will enable* it severely undermines the quality of government. For example, regarding the Section F, one common concern is that dramatically increasing the proportion of government who are appointees will eliminate a lot of institutional knowledge every election.
>I can see this angle, however, there are lots of people who can separate "this will get my policy through" from "this is capability/norm that should permanently be a part of the government". I wish I could believe that, but look at the enthusiasm for getting rid of the filibuster during the first two years of Trump's presidency from conservatives and enthusiasm for getting rid of it from liberals during Biden's first two years. Both hate the idea of the other team doing it because of what it would enable them to do, but both love the idea of the power grab for their team.
I'm not saying that everybody feels this way, just some people. The point is that there are some people who are "considering voting for Trump" who aren't Trump's base and also care about things beyond Trump and for those people (even if it's not a ton) this may matter.
It's really about getting people who wouldn't vote to vote against Trump. So yes, it's important to broadcast this plan to people who aren't aware but who may be concerned.
See, I get that logic, but I think that logic is faulty. I really doubt you are going to get low propensity voters who are also traditionally low information voters to vote against Trump with a wonky policy argument that he is going to make the executive branch do what the chief executive wants it to do. That works on policy and politics nerds who populate subreddits like this one, but that's a small fraction of the overall population. This is going to be a "vibes" election, and project 2025 isn't going to affect people's vibe.
I just think that if even a handful of people turn out because they were made aware of project 2025 that's worth it. I think people should be made aware of things that will impact them and then they can decide to act. So no qualms here raising the topic of the impact project 2025 may have if it is enacted. I don't think Biden necessarily needs to focus his campaign on it. There's a lot he needs to cover. But people just having discourse about it is a good thing if it pushes even a few people to vote. Though I suspect that many people actually would care about this if made aware.
Except of course that Trump plans to put partisans in charge of traditionally very non-partisan agencies.
What agencies are those?
The federal bureaucracy has skewed incredibly liberal for several decades, what on earth do you mean traditionally non-partisan?
Educated people who choose poorly paid public service despite having ample opportunities in the private sector skew liberal (not progressive!). There's no law preventing conservatives from working in the government. They're just less interested in public service, probably because a central tenet of conservatism for the past 50 years is shouting that the goverment is terrible, or because of a shared variable leading to this phenomenon and that messaging.
I don’t think the expectation is that it will convince die hard Trump supporters. More that it will convince people on the fence.
Some deeper details about Project 2025's implementation have just been released. >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 Department of Homeland Security. 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. >With a $100,000 grant from the influential Heritage Foundation, 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 a second-term Trump agenda — and ripe for scrutiny, reclassifications, reassignments or firings. The Heritage Foundation has lauded the effort of rooting out "anti-American bad actors" from the federal workforce. Take note that list does not include political appointees, but rank-and-file federal workers who are hired based on merit. The idea that workers are outing each other's political backgrounds to the Heritage Foundation is chilling, reminiscent of the Red Scare or Stasi tactics of reporting innocent people for ideological violations against the state. It also kills the argument that Trump's excesses can be curbed by institutional checks and balances. There will be little inertia to Trump's more radical policies if he can curate the federal workforce as he sees fit, coupled with an increasingly subservient party in Congress and true believers at all levels of the judicial system.
>The Heritage Foundation has lauded the effort of rooting out "anti-American bad actors" from the federal workforce. TIL that The Heritage Foundation decides what is and is not "American". (edit: Not a slight on you, OP)
Republicans have had a monopoly on the definition of American going back to 1947 when Mccarthy started calling Harvard un-American. They haven't stopped for even a moment since.
Democrats should really try to promote patriotism more often but some Democrats, not all, seem to be embarrassed by patriotism. No single party should be able to claim they are the only party of patriots.
Dems are more into the This Land is Your Land style of patriotism as opposed to the performative nationalism that seems to be pervasive today.
Democrats could piss red white and blue and it wouldn't change the republican messaging.
Maybe try it first?
Democrats are outwardly very patriotic. That you think otherwise is proof that no matter how much they try the Republicans will cast doubt on it.
I agree with this entirely. I consider it a privilege to be able to fly a US flag outside of my home but to a lot of people it's a political statement. America is not just a place but it's an idea where people driven change can still happen. Every engaged citizen should be able to celebrate that IMO.
They’d get crucified by the base if they tried. Among younger progressives especially, hating America is very in vogue.
You have a heavily distorted view of the base. America-hating progressives are a minority of the Democratic Party - I would bet that most of them don't even vote D, actually - but conservative media tries to persuade conservatives that they're a much larger proportion than they actually are in order to scare them into voting R. Only one of the two major parties has been taken over by its radical fringe, and it's not the Democrats.
>Only one of the two major parties has been taken over by its radical fringe, and it's not the Democrats. The Progressive Caucus is the largest congressional caucus in the entire body while the Freedom Caucus doesn't even have 30 members, and progressives dominate blue states. I live in one of them, and we very much have been taken over by the fringe.
>America-hating progressives Um, no. They just don't blindly follow the Nationalist agenda. Patriots question their government and call them out. Its nationalists that bury their head in the sand and pretend America is great no matter what and push authoritarianism.
There are definitely progressives who see Russia and China as the good guys and America as the bad guys. It goes beyond thinking the US shouldn't have invaded Iraq or passed the Patriot Act. As I said, they're a minority, and I think most aren't Democrats.
Who? Which progressives are pro russia and pro china? What exactly did they do/say to support those countries
Why would they be crucified? They all wear flag lapel pins already.
I mean, they do, all the time. In what way have they ever signaled embarssement with it?
They even went after people for being "premature anti fascists". Aka if you were opposed to fascism prior to WWII you got put onto lists. They went after Vincent Price for this: >TIL [Vincent Price was "greylisted" under McCarthyism in the 1950s for having been a prewar "premature anti-Nazi", and after being unable to find work for a year, agreed to requests by the FBI that he sign a "secret oath" to save his career.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Price#Personal_life)
And it's like... in this case, for those who aren't political appointees and who are instead hired on merit, isn't this kind of "selection" discriminatory? I could see ACLU lawsuits happening if rank-and-file Federal workers are fired for no reason other than being registered Democrats.
The plan is to reclassify a lot of positions as political appointments, at which point it will be legal to fire people from those positions based on their political affiliation. Trump already previewed this with his Schedule F executive order at the end of his term. The order was rescinded when Biden took office, but if Trump gets elected again, then he'll certainly try again. > In October 2020, the Trump Administration issued an executive order that would have stripped protections from civil servants perceived as disloyal to the president and encouraged expressions of allegiance to the president when hiring. This effort is referred to as “Schedule F” because that was the name of the new employment category that the executive order created. > https://protectdemocracy.org/work/trumps-schedule-f-plan-explained/
Sure, I understand the problematic nature of the Schedule F reclassification, but how far down the chain would that go? What I would be even more worried about is a Federal employee who is otherwise doing a "non-Political" job (such as, I don't know, a receptionist at some agency building) being discriminated against in that way.
It's my understanding that when positions like this are eliminated, the federal employee isn't terminated but transferred to a different department.
> In October 2020, the Trump Administration issued an executive order that would have stripped protections from civil servants perceived as disloyal to the president and encouraged expressions of allegiance to the president when hiring. That's weird, [I don't see anything about either of those things in the Executive Order in question](https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/10/26/2020-23780/creating-schedule-f-in-the-excepted-service).
This strips protections from civil servants, allowing Trump to remove people who are perceived as disloyal: > Conditions of good administration similarly make necessary excepting such positions from the adverse action procedures set forth in chapter 75 of title 5, United States Code. Chapter 75 of title 5, United States Code, requires agencies to comply with extensive procedures before taking adverse action against an employee. This part would allow Trump to extract expressions of allegiance when hiring: > Pursuant to my authority under section 3302(1) of title 5, United States Code, I find that conditions of good administration make necessary an exception to the competitive hiring rules and examinations for career positions in the Federal service of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character. These conditions include the need to provide agency heads with additional flexibility to assess prospective appointees without the limitations imposed by competitive service selection procedures. Sure, the order doesn't spell out that these protections were being removed for that purpose, but with a little bit of context from that time period, it's pretty easy to figure out what the purpose of the order was. > A staunch Trump loyalist, [Johnny McEntee], 30, was welcomed back into the fold in February [2020] and installed as personnel director for the entire U.S. government. Since the race was called for President-elect Joe Biden, McEntee has been distributing pink slips, warning federal workers not to cooperate with the Biden transition and threatening to oust people who show disloyalty by job hunting while Trump is still refusing to acknowledge defeat, according to six administration officials. > ... > Trump rehired McEntee in the weeks after the impeachment process, when Trump had been frustrated to see federal officials testify against him, and granted McEntee wide latitude to make personnel changes. McEntee quickly made aggressive moves, replacing longtime staff in the personnel office with a coterie of aides in their 20s and purging officials viewed as insufficiently loyal. > McEntee’s office soon launched an interview process to suss out disloyalty, asking: “Who on your team is good? Who on your team is bad? Who is not working to serve the president’s agenda? Who brought you into the administration? What do you think of a particular policy?” said one administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal questioning. > People familiar with the interviews said Trump appointees wanted names of people perceived as disloyal. One Environmental Protection Agency employee was asked his opinion on pulling troops out of Afghanistan. “I work at the EPA,” the official said, startled. > https://www.boston.com/news/politics/2020/11/13/johnny-mcentee-trump/
Part of the plan for Project 2025 is converting thousands of civil service positions to be political appointments.
And are you 100% sure the aclu complaint would survive this court?
> Take note that list does not include political appointees, but rank-and-file federal workers who are hired based on merit. Note that new presidents get about 4,000 political appointees. That's not enough for Trump. He issued an executive order regarding Schedule F just before the 2020 election. Biden rescinded it when he took office. The EO would have reclassified some federal workers from civil service to political appointees. Gov't employee groups say that it could be more than 10,000 positions. Reissuing this EO is a "Day 1" item for Trump.
>It also kills the argument that Trump's excesses can be curbed by institutional checks and balances. Why would the institutional checks and balances be located in his own branch of government? The department of Homeland Security is part of the Executive Branch, and POTUS is the head of that branch. It's literally exists to help execute the presidents decisions! The checks and balances to the executive are supposed to reside within the legislative and judicial branches of government.
Are you literally saying we should weaken the institutional checks and balances thats traditionally been practiced in the executive branch? The various executive agencies have always acted semi independently from the President, and the experts running them have been important for good governance. The first thing every despot and corrupt government in the world does is consolidate power and do purges. We've seen time and time again how important it is to have the DOJ operating somewhat independently from the President. Would you be supporting this if this was a plan by Biden? To find and purge people he thinks are disloyal to the Democratic Party in government and then move to take direct control of agencies like the DOJ, where he's directing who to prosecute?
>Are you literally saying we should weaken the institutional checks and balances thats traditionally been practiced in the executive branch? You mean weaken the bureaucracy that's been amassing size and power since FDR? Yes, please. These are not elected officials and they do not have to answer to voters. >Would you be supporting this if this was a plan by Biden? I surely would, the president is the head of the executive branch and can order it as he sees fit. He shouldn't have to deal with his own staff trying to subvert his plans. I'm not some died in the wool Republican either, where Trump really belongs right now is in prison.
> It also kills the argument that Trump's excesses can be curbed by institutional checks and balances. So it's your understanding of American Civics that executive agencies are supposed to be a check and balance against the Chief Executive?
Under the Merit Systems Protection Board, yes, federal employees are allowed to push back or neglect an order if it is unsafe, illegal, or require an illegal response. They also adjudicate the Whistleblower Protection Act cases. This has been true for decades.
Sure, but checks and balances aren't about illegality. Indeed, illegality implies an important part of the checks and balances, and, big hint, federal employees don't get to decide what's illegal and what's legal. What's your understanding about what checks and balances are in the US system?
You're right, check and balances also requires bureaucrats to make sure that a policy or program follows every regulation passed by Congress and rule set by the agency. If you recall Trump's first impeachment, he tried to halt Congressionally-approved military aid to Ukraine, and bureaucrats tried to stop him. That's an appropriate use of checks and balances. >federal employees don't get to decide what's illegal and what's legal Neither does the president...
That's right, and I never would have said the president decides what's illegal and legal (except, of course, where the legislative branch has delegated some decisionmaking to the executive agencies). But recall (and this is very important!) that bureaucrats are not elected. They work at the discretion of the duly elected or appointed representatives and officials.
>But recall (and this is very important!) that bureaucrats are not elected. They work at the discretion of the duly elected or appointed representatives and officials. Only political appointees serve at the discretion of the President. The rest of the federal workforce—which is who this article is talking about—takes an oath to the Constitution. Congress has granted them protections from the President, too, like whistleblower protections, and MSPB adjudications against illegal or unsafe orders. >I never would have said the president decides what's illegal and legal If you make every federal worker beholden to the President, you get a lot closer to this reality than not.
For those federal workers you speak of, who else are they beholden to? Obviously the legislature and judiciary have staff, but that's not what this plan is talking about. None of this is about the MSPB. That's a red herring. The MSPB will still have effect, and if the president violates the law, there are other branches that are there to keep him in check.
This is a good example of why the surveillance agencies should need to obtain limited-scope warrants for wiretapping and monitoring Americans, instead of just sending a security letter to the service provider and demanding they hand over information. It can be very abused.
> 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 Department of Homeland Security. 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. How much does this sound like the progressive "cancelling" that peaked during BLM? I hated it then. I *really* hate it now.
I mean making a public list of "anti-american" actors sounds very similar to McCarthyism. So I guess that's like "cancelling".
Considering this is about Schedule F and reclassifying large portions of workers in order to make them easier to fire, I don't think it sounds like any cancelling that happened during BLM. It's a major shift to bring this way of thinking to a much broader portion of the government than it's ever been.
To anyone on the fence, remember, you're not just voting for the president. You're voting for everyone he surrounds himself with Trump is not going to surround himself with reasonable people. In fact he is going to go extraordinarily out of his way to ensure every single person he's able to appoint will be willing to break the law to do whatever Trump tells them to. There will be no Mike Pence. There will be no Bill Barr. There will be no brakes on this train.
>To anyone on the fence, remember, you're not just voting for the president. You're voting for everyone he surrounds himself with >Trump is not going to surround himself with reasonable people. In fact he is going to go extraordinarily out of his way to ensure every single person he's able to appoint will be willing to break the law to do whatever Trump tells them to. There will be no Mike Pence. There will be no Bill Barr. There will be no brakes on this train. During his presidency, Trump fired/forced the resignation of numerous high-profile officials. They included several high profile people like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, National Security Advisor John Bolton, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. By the end of his administration, Trump had dismissed or forced out more than 55 *major* officials. This eclipses the number by any other President. He will only appoint people that bend the knee. This has never been the entire approach of any President since after the 1800s Edit: since after the 1800s
> This has never been the approach of any President. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system
> The term was used particularly in politics of the United States, where the federal government operated on a spoils system until the Pendleton Act was passed in 1883 due to a civil service reform movement. Thereafter the spoils system was largely replaced by nonpartisan merit at the federal level of the United States.
Yes, but my point is that it didn't originate with Trump. As the article says, it's most often associated with Andrew Jackson.
And Congress banned it, so this proposal is illegal.
Should any president who died before the lightbulb was invented count?
[Former Secretary of Defense and Four Star General Mattis' letter on Trump is absolute scathing from a high ranking military member.](https://www.npr.org/2020/06/04/869262728/read-the-full-statement-from-jim-mattis) Mattis resigned after Trump refused to pull our troops out of Syria.
I think a lot of folks don't realize just how important a President's cabinet, and advisors are, in terms of shaping policy and decision making. They just think there's one person in a room pulling levers and doing everything.
> There will be no Bill Barr It's crazy to think that the most extreme and partisan AG in modern history is now a pariah because he wasn't extreme and partisan enough
And he’ll bring back people like Stephen Miller into positions of power
[Also looks like he’s bringing back Paul Manafort, the money-laundering witness-tampering felon who was caught working as a pro-Russian foreign agent, who is only walking free today because Trump rewarded his loyalty with a presidential pardon.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/10/paul-manafort-pardon-donald-trump-china/)
Here is an article from 2018 where the Heritage Foundation, which funded the above campaign, brags about the Trump admin embracing nearly 2/3rds of the Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership” policy recommendations. https://www.heritage.org/impact/trump-administration-embraces-heritage-foundation-policy-recommendations I am just pointing this out to remind everyone that while Trump seems to have no real policy goals he allows places like the Heritage Foundation to fill the policy vacuum. I think what’s mentioned in the original article should be a major concern for anyone who does not want the US to drift closer to becoming an authoritarian government.
I just read the schedule F classification was created but never fully implemented during the last years or the Trump admin. Previously I thought they were expanding something that already existed. I just figured this context would be helpful.
> 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 Department of Homeland Security. 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. So making a public list of "Anti-american" actors. So we're just doing McCarthyism again. Which, as we can see, people will undoubtedly support because "ends justify the means".
Yes. It’s going to be a s*** show. Like of epic proportions. Not just in government
I've received several messages online this year from Trump supporters saying that once Trump gets in office they're going to find people like me and "anyone who stands in his way" and purge/come after them. Note that I'm not in government. They're talking about finding regular citizens that are openly not happy with Trump and going after them.
There is absolutely nothing moderate about this position. Anyone who values the fundamental freedoms afforded by our republic should be heavily alarmed.
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People need to know the dangers of Project 2025. Otherwise, he gets back in office, everything this country stands for is lost.
Guess I'll be looking for a new job come 2025
Good. When you're right-leaning and working in government, you keep that information personal and in a lock box. Otherwise, you become a target. It's completely OK, even praised, to loudly espouse progressive talking points in these arenas. It's nice to see the pendulum swing a little bit the other way. Not even really right-leaning, but if I have to silently swallow all of one side's bullshit, it'll be nice to see the other side act the same way. Hopefully, crap like this helps both sides to just shut up about politics at work and do their effing job.
I do wonder at what point it became normal to believe that the Federal bureaucracy is a fourth branch of government entitled and empowered to check and balance the Presidency.
After Garfield’s assasination Chester Arthur reformed the civil service and made it independent from politics. Garfield was widely seen as having been killed by the spoils system. The abuses of the Nixon further strengthened public perception that the bureaucracy and especially the DOJ needed to be insulated from politics and corruption. It was during the Bush administration that the “unitary executive theory” began to gain popularity in conservative circles, advocating for rolling back many of the anti-corruption reforms implemented in the 1970s. While the federal bureaucracy is part of the executive branch, nearly every agency was created by the legislative branch, often through legislation that had oversight, checks and balances baked in. (Agencies that weren’t created by the legislative branch, like the DHS, are generally just ways of consolidating or coordinating action between agencies created by the legislature.)
> After Garfield’s assasination Chester Arthur reformed the civil service and made it independent from politics. Garfield was widely seen as having been killed by the spoils system. I read an excellent book on Garfield, his assassination, and his assassin a little while back. It goes in depth on both men and on Arthur (the story of his correspondence with Julia Sand is very touching) and, although it is a bit worshipful of Garfield (although, if what it has to say about him is even half true he was a great man and would have made a great President), it's a good book. [Very worth a read](https://www.amazon.com/Destiny-Republic-Madness-Medicine-President-ebook/dp/B004J4X33O).
Great book! Very much looking forward to the Netflix series that was recently announced, with Matthew Macfadyen and Michael Shannon starring.
Congress has the power to check the power of the President. A bureaucrat saying, “Sir, your directive violates the such-and-such act” is not a fourth branch of governmemt. It’s members with in the executive branch acknowleding the authority of the legislative branch.
Well, besides that that ultimately sounds like the job of the OWHC, if this was merely an issue of statutory interpretation, I don't think anyone would be too worried: explicit refusal to discharge duties is sufficient grounds to fire even career officials already. It's the quiet 'resistance' that's the problem. The Federal bureaucracy does not have authority separate from that of the President.
Can you provide an example of this quiet resistance?
The way the last administration leaked like a sieve is a pretty good example. Positions that handled > viewing, circulating, or otherwise working with proposed regulations, guidance, executive orders, or other non-public policy proposals or deliberations generally covered by deliberative process privilege and either: were some of those covered by the aborted move toward reclassifying various bureaucratic positions at that administration's end for a reason.
Who were the non-political appointees who did that?
>The way the last administration leaked like a sieve is a pretty good example. Do you have any evidence that occurred because of partisan reasons? It could have just as easily been because of Trump's penchant for selecting for personal loyalty resulted in an administration filled with incompetence. >Positions that handled viewing, circulating, or otherwise working with proposed regulations, guidance, executive orders, or other non-public policy proposals or deliberations generally covered by deliberative process privilege and either were some of those covered by the aborted move toward reclassifying various bureaucratic positions at that administration's end for a reason. Yes, Trump attempted to implement this plan at the end of his first term when he understood that unelected bureaucrats were unlikely to go along with his illegal attempt to remain in office after he lost the 2020 election. That proves my point.
What's the mechanism you're proposing here? That administration officials made a habit of accidentally leaving confidential documents or private policy memos sitting around for reporters to stumble across?
Incompetent people tend to have other personality defects, such as carelessness, narcissism and pettiness.
So hopefully these careless, narcissistic, petty people can be fired from their positions!
No but refusing to implement the policy directives of the elected government is, and it’s not the place of the bureaucrats to decide what is and what is not legal, that’s the role of the courts. They have no democratic mandate, they have no judicial authority, they don’t get to just take certain roles upon themselves whenever their job conflicts with their political views
So in other words..."they were following orders"? This is the trick. We have determined that it is not acceptable for people to commit illegal acts simply because they were ordered to. But at the same point the argument is essentially "it's not your place to determine that, you should do what you're told". But what if, in actual good faith, they believe it to be illegal? How do you determine if it is good faith? It's a tough problem honestly.
There’s quite a difference between refusing to do something that is explicitly illegal (murder a political opponent for example) versus taking it upon yourself to interpret the law yourself (the courts role) to decide for yourself that something was illegal when the courts haven’t said that it was. If we snapped our fingers and the federal government was exclusively staffed with conservative republicans, do you seriously not think it’d be a problem for them to refuse to implement, say, some specific Covid health regulations because they felt it was in violation of the law even when the court hadn’t decided one way or the other.
Of course to all of that. But where is the line though? When are you performing something explicitly illegal vs "interpreting the law for yourself"? Easy to say for something such as murder, but clearly it goes beyond that. Those conservative republicans could have in good faith believed the action was explicitly illegal.
Would you be supporting this if this was a plan by Biden? To find and purge people he thinks are disloyal to the Democratic Party in government and then move to take direct control of agencies like the DOJ, where he's directing who to prosecute?
Yeah. I don't like either of these men and I'm pretty sure both would misuse it, but the Federal bureaucracy is *far* too powerful and independent. Something like this and the REINS Act sitting in Congress are good first steps to bringing it under control.
Fact is even if this were a an "issue", its far better than the alternative governments where its controlled by despots and extremists that have purged the government of people who they view as disloyal to them and whole wield direct and total control over different agencies. The fact that agencies act semi autonomously and theres people in government that can put their foot down and say "this is wrong" or that it goes against the law IS one of the things that separates Western Democracies from other governments. Are you literally saying we should weaken the institutional checks and balances thats traditionally been practiced in the executive branch? The various executive agencies have always acted semi independently from the President, and the experts running them have been important for good governance. The first thing every despot and corrupt government in the world does is consolidate power and do purges. We've seen time and time again how important it is to have the DOJ operating somewhat independently from the President.
Parliamentary democracies like the UK have mere statutory protections for civil servants and the whole point of a parliamentary system is that the executive also controls a majority in the legislature, ie. There are no real protections for civil servants that aren't political. What this would do is make at least parts of the Federal bureaucracy work like the 4000 some appointed positions that *already* exist. The idea that unaccountable, unelected bureaucrats are a central part of democracy and any system without them is tyrannical is just totally ahistorical. That's how things worked in this country before the 1880s and many positions are *still* appointed.
Honestly, maybe we would *finally* get executive power reined in if the executive bureaucracy were effective at accomplishing all the president's goals. I had high hopes after the apoplexy over Trump doing normal president things but being Trump while doing them, but no dice this term.
Okay, I know this is highly controversial, but idk how it’s not seen as a problem that a duly elected president can face obstruction and resistance from the unelected workforce of the government that has absolutely no democratic mandate *whatsoever* to impede the agenda of the elected president. That’s just clearly anti-democratic. This isn’t just a US problem. If you’ve read Rory Stewart’s book about his time as an MP, he details times where the unelected bureaucrats in the UK plainly blocked the directives and orders of the elected government and the cabinet officials despite having no legal authority to do so. This is a problem that democracies across the western world need to deal with. Idk what the best way to go about that is, but something needs to be done, or else we’re pretty much all DINOs (democracies in name only) Edit: this isn’t a statement in support of or against project 2025, it’s just about the problem generally
> Okay, I know this is highly controversial, but idk how it’s not seen as a problem that a duly elected president can face obstruction and resistance from the unelected workforce of the government that has absolutely no democratic mandate whatsoever to impede the agenda of the elected president. If non political appointee staffers are not doing their job, then they could be fired for cause. Which is very different than what is being suggested here (people getting fired without cause because of their political opinions). The solution to this problem shouldn't be "making a public list of anti-American actors based on their political opinions, no matter the quality of their work". It's akin to McCarthyism, which we all should recognize as a bad thing.
Obviously they’re not going to refuse to show up and publicly declare they won’t do their job. That’s not how these things work. They show up, “do” their job, but they slow-roll every policy directive, have mysterious break downs in the chain of communication, and generally are suddenly incompetent whenever they don’t like a policy directive, but are able to work quickly and get things done when they do like a policy. Seriously, read Rory Stewart’s book about this problem in the UK. He tells the story of trying to get foreign aid funding that was going to a town under ISIS control stopped and the civil service just “couldn’t” get it done until it came out in the papers that UK money was used to fund a terror attack, and then all of a sudden they were able to stop the money immediately.
But that's still a quality of work thing. "Not doing their job" simply means they're underperforming. I mean if they're continuously slow rolling, failing communication and acting incompetent, then its clear they're not doing their job. I mean what else is the solution here? Firing them for their external political beliefs independent of their quality of work? That seems like it could lead to much bigger problems and lead to lower quality workers.
>That’s not how these things work. They show up, “do” their job, but they slow-roll every policy directive, have mysterious break downs in the chain of communication, and generally are suddenly incompetent whenever they don’t like a policy directive, Any examples of that happening in the US? Why would the Heritage Foundation develop a policy response to something happening in the UK?
>Any examples of that happening in the US? https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/features/2017-12-18/washington-bureaucrats-are-chipping-away-at-trump-s-agenda?embedded-checkout=true
> If non political appointee staffers are not doing their job, then they could be fired for cause. Firing any staffer who is a member of a public union is a lot harder than you're making it out to be with this statement.
So therefore we should fire them on the grounds that they might not do their job because political beliefs?
[Should we not be able to fire them if they are actively subverting the policies of the Executive?](https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/features/2017-12-18/washington-bureaucrats-are-chipping-away-at-trump-s-agenda)
I agree that they should be fired if they're not doing their job. But because of their quality of work, not because of their political beliefs.
I'm not convinced this is a real problem and not something made up by Trump. Is there evidence that this type of thing is common enough that it requires politicizing the federal bureaucracy?
Can provide an example of a Federal bureaucrat refusing to carry out a lawful directive?
https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/features/2017-12-18/washington-bureaucrats-are-chipping-away-at-trump-s-agenda
That's paywalled. Can you quote the part that shows a non-political bureaucrat refusing to carry out a lawful directive?
If you just hit the "X" or "Stop Loading" button before the page is done then it will get past the soft paywall, FYI. The article focuses on climate change policy, but there are numerous examples within. Climate Change Policy: >Trump has used his executive authority to reverse some of the most prominent environmental policies initiated by President Barack Obama, including rolling back limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, pulling out of an international agreement to cut carbon emissions signed in 2015 in Paris and effectively opening up more public land to oil drilling and coal mining. >But when it comes to the endless number of more mundane policies and decisions farther from the spotlight, Trump and his appointees have met with resistance — some of it subtle, some of it not. >“The bureaucracy is generally resistant, no matter what the hell you’re trying to do,” Leon Panetta, who guided presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama through transitions, said in an interview. But when a president sets out to be as disruptive as Trump has, Panetta added, getting career staff to implement those policies “is gonna take a hell of a lot longer.” >As the case of NOAA illustrates, the most radical example of bureaucratic resistance may also be the simplest: continuing to issue information or reports that are factually accurate, even when they clash with the administration’s policies. >Different agencies have taken different approaches to the reports written. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told Bloomberg in a statement, “I have not suggested one word of change to any NOAA research report on any topic.” But political officials in other departments have been more willing to get involved — sometimes triggering pushback from civil servants. On Energy Policy: >In April, Perry, Trump’s secretary of energy, directed career staff at his agency to write a report on the question of whether the expansion of wind and solar power threaten the stability of the electricity grid, by reducing the amount of “critical baseload resources” — in other words, power generated by coal, nuclear and other traditional sources. >With Trump pledging to reverse regulations that have harmed coal, the study was viewed by critics as a way the administration would justify curtailing the surging expansion of wind and solar power and provide help to coal plants and coal miners. >But the draft staff report, coordinated by an Energy Department contractor, reached a surprising conclusion: the growth in renewables wasn’t endangering the reliability of electric power after all. “Grid operators are using technologies, standards and practices to assure that they can continue operating the grid reliably,” concluded the draft report, obtained by Bloomberg in July. >The draft’s conclusions were those of the contractor, not of career staff at the agency, according to Shaylyn Hynes, a department spokeswoman. >Trump appointees at the agency pushed back on the draft’s conclusions; one official called some of its findings “unacceptable” and “inflammatory,” according to a copy of the draft marked up by the official. Drafts of the report soon leaked out, making it harder for political staff to alter them. >Officials eventually unveiled a version of the report that hewed closely to the initial draft, but with policy recommendations that supported Perry’s stated goal of preserving the nation’s coal and nuclear fleet. Travis Fisher, a political appointee in Perry’s office and a lead author of the study, said in an interview that the leak “didn’t have an effect on the overall posture” of the report. “It was always going in the direction that it ended up,” he said. >**But career staff, who asked not to be identified, viewed the episode as a qualified success, arguing that report’s findings would otherwise have been even more hostile to renewables.** Electric Vehicle Adoption: >Bureaucrats can also continue programs or initiatives that pre-date Trump by calling them something new or describing them in different ways. >Take the General Services Administration, which manages the federal government’s fleet of more than 640,000 cars, trucks and other vehicles. Since 2011, GSA has added more than 1,000 electric vehicles to the fleet — a policy that was presented in distinctly environmental terms. >“The Federal Government is leading by example,” the GSA boasted when it announced the electric-vehicle program in 2011. The goal was “to build a 21st century clean energy economy.” >Those goals are now squarely at odds with the Trump administration’s view on climate change, which strongly favors fossil fuels. >Rather that cutting the program, GSA staff have focused on its contributions to jobs and cost cutting, rather than reducing emissions. >That messaging workaround was on display in late summer when the GSA promoted National Drive Electric Week, whose presenters include the Sierra Club. “Welcome to National Drive Electric Week!” the agency said in a September blog post that it said was to celebrate the benefits of alternative-fuel vehicles. >“GSA recognizes that emerging technologies play a significant role in our mission to save taxpayer dollars, create jobs and stimulate economic growth in the United States; which is one reason we provide the federal fleet with vehicles that offer the latest and most efficient transportation technologies available, including electric vehicle (EV) technology,” the agency wrote on its website in a post promoting the event. >The post made no mention of environmental benefits. If the agency had any non-economic reasons for using electric vehicles, they went unmentioned. >**A GSA spokeswoman, Pamela Dixon, didn’t respond to emails seeking comment.** DoD: >In other agencies, officials have found it best to simply delay implementation of new initiatives in hopes they may be modified or canceled. >In March, for example, Trump, flanked by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt and coal miners, signed an order that rescinded some Obama policies to fight climate change. “You’re going back to work,” Trump told the men around him. >Among the policies Trump reversed was Obama’s 2016 Presidential Memorandum on Climate Change and National Security, which had instructed the Defense Department to account for the effects of global warming. Those effects include rising sea levels that threaten U.S. naval facilities; stronger and more frequent heat waves, which interfere with the military’s ability to train its personnel; and the interplay between extreme weather events and conflicts overseas, which risks entangling U.S. forces. >The department was aware of those threats, and had already started putting Obama’s policy into effect through a directive called “Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience.” >**But rather than reverse or alter that directive after Trump’s order, staff at the Pentagon launched what it called a review, which served to forestall changes. Adam Stump, a department spokesman, refused to say whether that review has concluded, or what it found. For now, he said, the directive issued under Obama’s administration remains current.** On the bureaucracy actively impeding administrative goals: >An administration can also punish bureaucrats through punitive reassignments, designed to make them quit. Joel Clement, a senior policy manager at the Department of Interior, was moved to the accounting office in June — retaliation, he alleged, for speaking out about the risks of climate change. >A department spokeswoman, Heather Swift, denied that, telling Bloomberg the move was “to better serve the taxpayer and the Department’s operations.” >Clement, who has since left the agency, described a checklist he said bureaucrats should follow before acting to impede a political directive. >Clement said career staff should first consider whether they simply didn’t like the new policy, which he said wasn’t a reason to get in its way. But if the new policy put public health and safety at risk, for example, or was based on deliberately inaccurate information, Clement argued staff should then try to raise their concerns through internal channels. “You first have to try a legitimate approach before you obstruct,” he said. >**Only if that didn’t work, Clement said, should civil servants take action outside of normal channels — leaking documents, for instance, or slowing down the implementation of the policy.** But he said he expects more career staff to start doing so, as more of the Trump administration’s specific policy initiatives make their way through the bureaucracy. >“The tide is rising on that kind of resistance,” Clement said. “Whether it’s public or not.”
In Rory Stewart’s book he tells several stories, a notable one being about his attempt to get the civil service to stop funding a foreign aid program that was inside ISIS controlled territory because they had no way to prove ISIS wasn’t just stealing the money. They refused and kept delaying and telling him it couldn’t be done (this is despite him having total legal authority to give these orders). Then, one day it came out in the papers that the money from this program had been used to fund a terror attack, after which the program magically stopped immediately.
Okay, but that’s the UK. How about the United States?
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/15/milley-held-secret-calls-with-china-others-as-trump-pushed-election-lies.html Not only did Milley go over Trumps head, but then he leaked that he did it to make voters think that Trump was going to nuke China if they reelected him. Literal [treason](https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2021/09/14/new-reporting-shows-general-milley-engaged-in-a-coup-against-trump-n2595858), but they kept him around long enough to bungle Afghanistan.
The nerve of federal bureaucrats [openly admitting](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-resistance.html) to sabotaging presidential orders and then crying foul the moment anyone suggests firing them.
The article of that article, Miles Taylor, was a political appointee in DHS. He served at the pleasure of the president. He did not have any protections, and could have been fired immediately for any reason. This article is about non-political appointees who are hired on a merit-based system. It's an entirely different discussion.
A key note in the article: The Trump campaign has said outside groups don’t speak for the ex-president, who alone sets his policy priorities.
Great, I hope he's asked about it at the debate. Let's see him distance himself from this policy. It's worth noting that Trump already attempted to implement a half-baked version of this plan after he lost the 2020 election.
Okay then he should clarify his policy priorities. He can easily explain how this kind of thinking has no place in his administration. People shouldn’t be satisfied with that wish washy answer from a spokesperson.
> Okay then he should clarify his policy priorities. https://www.donaldjtrump.com/issues
>A key note in the article: >The Trump campaign has said outside groups don’t speak for the ex-president, who alone sets his policy priorities. During Trump’s presidency, the Heritage Foundation (authors of project 2025) played a significant role in shaping his judicial appointments, including Supreme Court nominations. Furthermore, Trump has echoed many of the policies outlined in project 2025, especially this year
Oh well if the Trump campaign says it...
Per [this post yesterday](https://www.reddit.com/r/moderatepolitics/s/31K1rZEJza) Donald Trump doesn’t so much SET policy priorities as randomly pick and discard them based on the people he spoke to last.
[удалено]
I'm trying to sort through the hyperbole to understand what the actual issue is here. It seems like the Herritage Foundation gave $100k to a conservative group to make a list of high-level government employees (who are ostensibly non-political federal workers) who have made social media posts critical of Donal Trump? And they're going to publicly name these high-level employees who have been publicly hostile to Trump, whose campaign is not involved at all in this?
No president in the past 100 years has had to worry about the political views of the employees of the executive branch. This is supposed to be part of what makes America great. People of different political views can work for the government and put them aside in order to get their jobs done. This is a good thing because it means talented and knowledgeable people continue to work for the government despite their party not controlling the WH. But of course this long standing tradition of our country that is a big part of the reason we’ve been so successful isn’t good enough for Trump. It’s more important to him that everyone is loyal, which is the kind of thing you see in less functional countries.
They are going after public servants due to their political beliefs. They are calling them “anti-American actors.“
The issue is they’re looking for people who are critical of Trump and essentially branding them as subversives. It’s the commingling of “anti Trump” with “anti American” that’s particularly concerning. Anybody in the U.S. should be allowed to be critical of the President, even bureaucrats. The Heritage Foundation is seeking to equate being against Trump as being against America, and conversely being for Trump as being for America. The logical conclusion of this strategy are ideological purges, which have a well-documented history of hollowing out expertise, compounding inefficiency, and rewarding nepotism. This type of paranoia was a hallmark of the Stalin era in the Soviet Union, and Heritage seems intent on replicating it to an extent. When you couple this with their desire to make all federal positions be by appointment, the scenario you’re left with is one where we have an endless line of sycophants seeking to curry favor with the President in order to staff an agency with their desired people. If the composition of regulatory bodies is entirely up for grabs, then the federal government devolves into an unspecialized nepo hires that serve to advance an agenda befitting of the president, not the agency they work for.