While former President Donald Trump is campaigning, his friends and associates at the far-right Heritage Foundation are hard at work pre-vetting potential government employees should he win another term this November. And numerous civil service veterans and experts are cautioning that the ex-president's war on the so-called "deep state" could create an actual deep state of loyalists hired explicitly to carry out Trump's every whim.
According to a recent CNN report, the former president's promise to "demolish the deep state" by purging the civil service of people not completely bought into his political worldview could result in widespread destabilization of federal agencies. Additionally, the exodus of knowledge and expertise prompted by mass firings of experienced federal workers could further hamper the efficacy of the public sector as a whole.
In late 2020, Trump issued an executive order dubbed "Schedule F," which removed numerous long-standing protections for federal workers, and drastically raised the threshold on the number of presidential appointees serving in the federal government from roughly 5,000 to more than 54,000 (Biden rescinded the order after taking office in 2021). And on his campaign website, Trump has pledged to "immediately reissue my 2020 executive order restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats. And I will wield that power very aggressively."
Heritage's Project 2025 presidential transition plan puts this theory into practice. A major plank of the initiative is to pre-screen tens of thousands of potential political appointees who will be ready to work in Trump's administration should he win a second term in November beginning on day one. Notably, Heritage isn't prioritizing prior experience in the public sector or expertise in crafting policy, but rather focusing on how loyal potential government workers would be to the MAGA agenda.
And while Trump campaign senior advisor Chris LaCivita has said that only Trump will decide who serves in his administration, Heritage's recommendations will likely be given top consideration. John McEntee, who was the director of the Trump White House's Presidential Personnel Office, was hired as a senior advisor to Project 2025 last year.
"The Presidential Personnel Database will be of extraordinary value for the 47th president because we are doing a lot of the incoming administration’s most important work ahead of time," McEntee stated in 2023.
Robert Shea, who worked in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in former President George W. Bush's White House, told CNN that Trump's restructuring of the federal government would create "an army of suck-ups."
READ MORE: 'Essence of authoritarianism': Expert warns 'Project 2025' would create a Trump 'autocracy'
“It would change the nature of the federal bureaucracy,” Shea said. “This would mean that if you told your boss that what he or she was proposing was illegal, impractical, [or] unwise that they could brand you disloyal and terminate you.”
Earlier this month, the Biden administration attempted to throw a wrench in the works to disrupt Trump's plans to reshape the federal government should he win in November. On April 4, the federal office that functions as the government's human resources office issued a new rule that prevented the roughly 2.2 million civil service workers across all federal agencies from being reclassified as at-will political appointees. Even though it doesn't fully block Trump from implementing his goals, any change would require a mandatory 90-day public comment hearing, and litigation could cause further roadblocks for Trump if he sought to gut the federal workforce.
Betsy Skerry, who is a policy associate for the nonprofit group Public Citizen, praised the ruling, saying it "ensures that [workers] are not being hired based on their political affiliations, but on merit and expertise."
"We need an independent federal workforce, not one that is beholden to an individual," Skerry told CNN.
READ MORE: 'Path to dictatorship': Columnist says Trump's 'thirst for vengeance' would go unchecked in 2nd term
Click here to read CNN's full report in its entirety.
