(Headline USA) Perhaps the biggest setback to the first Trump administration was not anything inherently flawed in Republican President Donald Trump’s leadership but the sheer bulk of disloyal individuals embedded within the Washington, D.C., bureaucracy, who were eager to undermine him at every level with little or no accountability.
In a normal workplace, these employees would be fired for insubordination. In the most extreme of circumstances they would be charged with sedition against the government and punished accordingly, with execution not outside the range of possibilities.
Instead, many of these conspirators—some of them dedicated socialists—were celebrated for their efforts by the Trump-Deranged media and the Democrat leaders who egged them on. But the day of reckoning may arrive with a second Trump term that offers the benefit of hindsight, having rooted them out while their guard was down.
From his home office in small-town Kentucky, a seasoned political operative is quietly investigating scores of federal employees suspected of being hostile to Trump’s policies, an effort that dovetails with broader conservative preparations for a new White House.
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, where one top official was recently found to harbor Hamas sympathies.
They’re relying in part on tips from his network of conservative contacts, including workers, and are 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.
“We need to understand who these people are and what they do,” said Jones, a former Capitol Hill aide to Republican senators.
Heritage President Kevin Roberts said the “weaponization of the federal government” has been possible only because of the “deep state of entrenched Leftist bureaucrats.” He said he was proud to support the work of American Accountability Foundation workers “in their fight to hold our government accountable and drain it of bad actors.”
Jones’ Project Sovereignty 2025 comes as Heritage’s Project 2025 lays the groundwork, with policies, proposals and personnel ready for a possible new White House.
The effort reflects the way the civil service has evolved in recent years—from a measure once intended to bolster good government, providing a check on the partisan influence and corruption that ran rampant under the prior “spoils system,” to a rats nest of leftist subversives who see their personal livelihood dependent on feeding the bureaucracy with more and more government waste.
Not surprisingly, the leftist operatives themselves see nothing wrong with their own partisan efforts to undermine a duly elected president, and consider that a job well done—even if it only cuts one way.
Jacqueline Simon, policy director at the American Federation of Government Employees, claimed the language being used was “shocking” after the Heritage Foundation’s announcement praised the group.
“It just seems as though their goal is to try to menace federal employees and sow fear,” said Simon, whose union backs President Joe Biden for reelection.
Skye Perryman, CEO of the radical leftist group Democracy Forward, claimed it was deeply disturbing and reminiscent of “the darker parts of American history.”
Publicly naming government workers is an “intimidation tactic to try to chill the work of these civil servants,” she said, and part of a broader “retribution agenda” underway this election.
“They’re seeking to undermine our democracy,” she said. “They’re seeking to undermine the way that our government works for people.”
The rhetoric echoes a broader tactic being deployed by leftists to accuse Republicans of planning to do the very things that they are actively engaged in. The conservative effort follows troubling censorship and lawfare tactics that have sought to chill dissenting voices on matters such as vaccine mandates, defunding the police, and even Biden’s declining mental health.
The tactic is one that was previously advocated by far-left subversive Saul Alinsky, whose Rule for Radicals handbook has been a major source of inspiration to modern “progressives.”
There is currently a broader push to discredit the conservative organization that parallels other leftist efforts, such as the attempt to undermine the Supreme Court. When run through the Left’s network of media and non-governmental organizations designed to create the perception of an organic, grassroots reaction, these well-funded smear attacks have sometimes proven effective, just as the coordinated campaign to undermine Trump.
However, the Biden administration, by pushing things beyond the realm of plausible deniability, have forced an increasing number to openly acknowledge their bad-faith intentions and vested interests in a partisan outcome.
Civil servants are required to take an oath to the Constitution to work for the federal government, not a loyalty test to a president in the White House, she insisted, although it remained unclear how they were serving the Constitution in many instances.
The Trump campaign has said outside groups don’t speak for the ex-president, who alone sets his policy priorities. However, the Heritage Foundation has spent years compiling its policy research with top experts to present him with what it hopes will be a set of recommendations from which he may draw, starting on Day 1.
The Heritage Foundation is working to recruit and train a new generation to travel to Washington to fill government jobs.
The federal government employs about 2.2 million people, including those in the Washington, D.C., area and workers who the unions say many Americans know as friends or neighbors in communities across the country.
About 4,000 positions in the government are considered political appointees who routinely change from one presidential administration to the next, but most are career professionals—from landscapers at Veterans Administration cemeteries to economists at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Project 2025 proposes reviving the Trump Schedule F policy that would try to reclassify tens of thousands of federal workers as political appointees, which could enable mass dismissals—although a Biden administration rule seeks to make that more difficult.
While Jones’s group won’t necessarily be recommending whether to fire or reassign the federal workers it lists, the work aligns with the Project 2025 blueprint for a conservative administration.
In announcing the $100,000 Innovation Award last month, Heritage said it would support American Accountability Foundation’s “investigative researchers, in-depth reports, and educational efforts to alert Congress, a conservative administration, and the American people to the presence of anti-American bad actors burrowed into the administrative state and ensure appropriate action is taken.”
Jones is a former staffer to then-Sen. Jim DeMint, the South Carolina conservative Republican who later led Heritage and now helms the Conservative Policy Institute, where American Accountability Foundation has a mailing address.
Jones also worked for Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., and provided opposition research for Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential bid.
From his desk overlooking rickhouses storing barrels in the Bourbon Capitol of Bardstown, he works with a team of six researchers who operate remotely across the country, poring over the information about federal workers within Homeland Security, the State Department and other agencies that deal with immigration and border issues.
Their focus is on the highest ranks of the civil servants—GS-13, GS-14 and GS-15 employees and those in senior executive positions who could put up roadblocks to Trump’s plans for tighter borders and more deportations.
“I think it’s important to the next administration to understand who those people are,” Jones said.
He dismissed the risks that could be involved in publicly posting the names, salary information and other details of federal workers who have some level of privacy or the idea his group’s work could put employees’ livelihoods in jeopardy.
“You don’t get to make policy and then say, ‘Hey, don’t scrutinize me,”’ he said.
He acknowledges some of the work is often a “gut check” or “instinct” about which federal employees would be suspected of trying to block a conservative agenda.
“We’re looking at, ‘Are there wrong people on the bus right now that are, you know, openly hostile to efforts to secure the southern border?’” he said.
Despite the complaints from the Left that they are being targeted, Jones and his group have been targeted as well for their efforts as the current administration fights back to preserve the moles it has worked tirelessly to install as saboteurs for the next Republican president.
Biden had repealed Trump’s Schedule F executive order in January 2021, but a Government Accountability Office report in 2022 found that agencies believed it could be reinstated by a future administration.
Since then, the Biden administration issued a rule that would make it harder to fire workers. A new administration could direct the Office of Personnel Management to undo the regulation, but the process would take time and be open to legal challenges.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
