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SCHED F BAK

8 22 disambig

merri ok

SEE DOGE COUP MUSK 6 DOGE 4 EPA ZELDIN RFK

SEE FAscism

see govt shutdown 10 25 fire fed workers

see exec o xo dodge coup

see russ vought trump trans admin pjt 2025

see admin state bannon

// deep state

anti-gubmint

~expertise

SEE MOVE HQ AGY bs bernhardt

see enemy list, retaliation

BAK 3 26

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AN 10 26

A longtime lawmaker and former diplomat flagged how illegal a recent move at the State Department is this week.

The Washington Sun reported Thursday that the State Department has begun asking career diplomats up for promotion whether they voted for President Donald Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024.

Washington Sun reporter Eric Katz explained that "federal law prohibits politically based hiring for career staff."

According to the report, "Top officials in the State Department made clear that only candidates who voted for President Donald Trump would be eligible for the mid-to-upper level foreign service roles. They also told candidates that their campaign donation history would be examined and any donation to Democrats would be disqualifying."

The report comes on the heels of another revelation that the State Department is trying to shove out the top career staff, leaving a huge void of experience and longtime foreign relationships.

According to some, senior State Department officials are outright asking longtime employees to retire. Others "have been reassigned other top career staff into the Administration Bureau, what employees consider to be a 'purgatory' where employees’ careers 'go to die.'"

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen said that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has been following the allegations.

“These are critical national security positions and individuals should be chosen for their experience and ability, not their political loyalty. We are working with the House and other relevant committees to thoroughly investigate all such claims," she said.

Former Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), who also served as a diplomat and assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, posted on X that all of this is illegal.

"Asking career officers how they voted is not just wrong — it violates the Hatch Act. Those doing it may be investigated by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, fired, and/or fined," said Malinowski. "There is no statute of limitations — so the next administration can go after them."

One of the biggest problems with the Hatch Act, however, is that it outlines possible penalties but does not impose one automatic punishment, such as firing, for every violation. If a Trump appointee has already left the administration, firing them isn't a punishment. A civil fine, however, could be. The president could not pardon a Hatch Act violation as it is classified as civil administrative infraction, explained the Brookins Institute.

Malinowski said that any future administration could impose a penalty for a Hatch Act violation on a Trump appointee, but the firing from office likely wouldn't matter if they were already gone. A civil fine could be issued, but the maximum is $1,000; however, it outlines that the penalty is "adjusted for inflation." The Hatch Act was first passed into law in 1939. The Bureau of Labor Statistics offers a CPI Inflation Calculator.

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1 loyalist grANT CZAR AT EACH AgENCY?!

btb 6 26

work medicaid?!

ps://elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/this-new-omb-rule-is-bigger-than

When I published my summary of OMB’s proposed Federal Financial Assistance rule last week, I was writing from my lane. I spent 22 years as an NIH Program Official overseeing federally funded science. I know firsthand how real and severe that damage to science funding would be, and it deserved to be named clearly.

I want to widen the lens now, because the more I have dug into this rule, the more I realize that scientists are not the only ones who should be alarmed. Not even close.

2 CFR Part 200, the regulation being rewritten here, is not the science grants regulation. It is the universal legal framework governing every federal grant to every recipient across every agency in the federal government. When OMB rewrites it, they are rewriting the rules for all of it.

According to the Congressional Research Service, in FY2024 the federal government sent $1.1 trillion in grants to state and local governments. That money is what funds:

Every single one of those programs operates under 2 CFR Part 200. Every one of them is now subject to the same provisions I described last week.

Consider what that means in practice. Political appointees who can override expert judgment and block science grants that don’t advance the President’s priorities would have that same power over transportation awards, and housing funds, not just NIH applications. Any active grant could be canceled mid-project because it no longer serves ‘the national interest.’ A highway already under construction. A tribal health program mid-delivery. A city still rebuilding from a flood. And every new grant program must align with administration priorities before a single application is even solicited. Entire categories of funding can be quietly discontinued without a public announcement or a vote.

Federal grants are not peripheral to how states and communities function. They represent, on average, 36 cents of every dollar a state spends. This rule puts that entire financial partnership between the federal government and the states under political control, without an act of Congress, effective October 1, 2026.

A scientist reading my last post understood immediately why they should be worried. These professionals should also be concerned:

This rule touches all of them.

If you found my original post worth sharing, I hope you will share this one too, especially with people outside the scientific community who may not yet know this is coming. The comment period is open now and closes July 13, 2026.

Submit your comment in opposition here: https://www.regulations.gov/document/OMB-2026-0034-0001**

You do not need to be an expert. You need to describe, in your own words, how your community, your program, your state, or your work depends on stable, merit-based federal grants and what it would mean to lose that. Cite the specific section that would hurt your community.

Below I have compiled the specific provisions that should concern people outside the scientific community, organized by who they affect most. Pick one or two that apply to your situation and cite them in your comment.

For State & Local Governments and Communities

§200.340 — Discretionary Termination is the one that should keep every state and local budget director awake at night. This is the provision that allows any active federal grant to be canceled mid-project because a political appointee decides it no longer serves the national interest.

§200.202 — Program Goals Must Align with Administration Priorities is the second most important for states, because it operates upstream of everything else. Before a state can even apply for a grant, the federal program must be designed to align with the President’s policy priorities.

§200.204 — Grant Competitions Can Be Hidden from Public View compounds the §200.202 problem. If agencies can exempt funding opportunities from public posting on Grants.gov under a broad national interest exception, states may not even know a competition exists until it is over.

§200.205 — Political Appointee Pre-Issuance Review is particularly alarming for local governments and community organizations because it inserts a political filter between a competitive application and an award decision. A local housing authority, a tribal nation, or a rural health clinic that wins on the merits can still be denied, with no appeal right and no requirement to explain why.

§200.206 — Denial Based on Organizational Affiliations is one that community-based organizations need to flag urgently. The language is broad enough to disqualify civil rights groups, environmental advocacy organizations, public health nonprofits, and community organizing entities. Given how expansively the rule’s preamble defines “anti-American activity,” this provision threatens the civic infrastructure that delivers many federally funded community services.

For Healthcare and Social Service Providers

§200.300 — DEI and Related Prohibitions is the most urgent provision for healthcare and social service organizations. The prohibition on using federal funds to promote or facilitate “DEI practices,” “gender ideology,” or related activities is embedded as a mandatory grant condition across all agencies and all programs. For Medicaid-funded health systems, community health centers, and social service agencies, this creates an impossible conflict: the populations these organizations serve are, by definition, the ones equity-focused programs are designed to reach. And because the rule never defines what counts as a prohibited DEI practice, providers face open-ended liability for ordinary program activities.

§200.218 — Disparate Impact Research and Programming Banned is a completely new provision, with no current counterpart in the regulations. It prohibits federal grant funds from supporting disparate-impact studies, disparate-impact litigation, and any program design based on “the assumed risk of disparate-impact liability.” Disparate-impact analysis is a foundational tool of civil rights law, public health research, environmental justice, housing policy, and labor economics. Banning its use in federally funded work would gut decades of evidence-based policy research.

§200.340 — Discretionary Termination applies here too, with particular cruelty. A community health center mid-way through a three-year federally funded program serving patients with chronic disease, a behavioral health organization running a longitudinal treatment study, a food bank administering a multi-year USDA nutrition program—all are now exposed to termination with only a brief written rationale required and no meaningful appeal right.

For Education Providers

§200.300 — DEI Prohibitions applied to Title I, IDEA, Head Start, and workforce training grants creates a direct conflict with the statutory purpose of those programs. Title I exists to direct resources to high-poverty schools. IDEA exists to ensure children with disabilities receive appropriate services. Characterizing equity-focused programming as an unallowable DEI activity inverts the entire purpose of the statutes Congress passed to create those programs.

§200.205 — Political Appointee Review applied to education grants means that competitive federal education awards, including those for curriculum development, teacher training, and educational research, pass through a political screen that has nothing to do with educational quality or student outcomes.

§200.450 — Issue Advocacy Prohibition is particularly significant for education providers because it could restrict grantees from communicating findings, advocating for students before state agencies, or engaging in routine community education work.

How to write an effective Comment. Make it completely unique! Do not cut and paste.

1:Say who you are and why you are qualified to comment. You do not need credentials. Being affected is enough, and simply being a concerned citizen is perfectly fine.

2:List the exact provision #s [PICK ONE or TWO FROM LIST ABOVE] that concern you, and explain what they would do. You do not need to quote the rule directly. Just explain what you understand it to mean in plain terms.

3:Explain the concrete harm. What would happen to you, your community, or your state if this provision takes effect?

4:Closing: State clearly what you want OMB to do. This can be as simple as: “I urge OMB to withdraw these specific provisions: §200.340, §200.202, §200.205.” or “I urge OMB not to finalize this rule.”

Submit your comment in opposition here: https://www.regulations.gov/document/OMB-2026-0034-0001**** The deadline is July 13, 2026.

https://elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of-key-changes-in-ombs-proposed

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/05/29/2026-10817/regulation-for-federal-financial-assistance

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// PVTIZATION?

AN 5 26

Trump tries to plug leaks with NDA plan for all federal government workers - Alternet.org

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AN 3 26

For years, Donald Trump and his MAGA followers railed against the so-called "deep state" within the government that was working to prevent his political goals. Now, according to a new analysis from MS NOW, the president is the one creating his own deep state within the government by heavily staffing agencies with loyalists.

In a piece published Wednesday, MS NOW's Zeeshan Aleem argued that the administration was in the process of "Trumpifying" the federal workforce. He characterized this as the second phase of Trump's larger plan to create a "MAGA state," following his mass layoffs earlier in his second term. This plan, to staff the government top to bottom with loyal followers who would rubber-stamp his every whim, was a major proposal contained in Project 2025.

Aleem cited a recent report from the Washington Post, which detailed how the administration is now working to bring in a "wave of new federal employees who will unthinkingly obey the president’s political directives," as opposed to the traditional bureaucrats Trump fired last year, who were only concerned with "providing nonpartisan expertise." Stephen Miller, Trump's controversial far-right senior advisor, is reportedly overseeing this process and "ensuring that new hires are aligned with Trump’s agenda."

"That’s a clear sign that the Trump administration has real ambition to change the way the federal bureaucracy works," Aleem wrote. "Miller is one of the most Machiavellian figures in the Trump administration and one of its most vocal ideologues in favor of authoritarian and nativist governance. Miller surely approves of a new immigration services job posting titled 'Homeland Defender,' which, according to the Post, asks applicants to be ready to 'protect your homeland and defend your culture.'"

Aleem also highlighted comments from Scott Kupor, the head of the Office of Personnel Management, who pledged to make the civil service workforce younger and established a "Tech Force" program to work with companies like OpenAI and Meta to create a pathway to private sector jobs for employees who work for a time in the federal government. The reporter argued that those plans are merely a cover to "import brash young tech bros with the kind of 'move fast and break things' ethos that DOGE used to take a wrecking ball to vital social services."

These efforts to reshape the federal workforce, he warned, could long outlast Trump's presidency.

"Put all these things together, and a clear agenda to morph the civil service into a political instrument of Trump comes into view," Aleem concluded. "Historically, the federal workforce is a corps of nonpartisan employees who use their expertise to advise on and execute the policies of the federal government. Trump wants to turn it into an army of reactionary yes-men. Even after he leaves office, many of these MAGA state hires are likely to remain, and the government will be worse off because of it."

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AN 2 26

President Donald Trump’s sweeping government cuts have cost 62,000 veterans their jobs, according to a budget-oriented think tank — and worse is yet to come.

“The Trump Administration has radically slashed the federal civilian workforce, sidestepping Congress and causing disruptions, slowdowns, and fragility in a range of critical public services that people and communities depend on,” wrote the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities on Friday. “Veterans have been affected by these cuts both as members of the federal workforce and as recipients of federal health care and other benefits available to them based on their service.”

The federal government has been a large employer of veterans for many decades, with veterans accounting for roughly 30 percent of all federal employees in recent years. The number of veterans working in the federal government fell by nearly 10 percent between September 2024 and December 2025, resulting in the lowest number of veterans in the federal workforce in over 15 years, according to data no longer available online from the Office of Personnel Management.

“Veterans have felt the impact of the Administration’s chaotic and sweeping personnel policies across the federal government, including at the IRS, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Department of Education,” the think tank writes. “But it’s at the VA — the federal agency dedicated to running programs and services that benefit veterans and their families, including providing care through nearly 1,400 health care facilities — where the harm to veterans may be most acute.” Trump has eliminated nearly 28,000 VA employees, or roughly 6 percent of the agency’s staff, including more than 2,700 nurses, more than 1,000 medical officers, more than 1,000 psychologists and social workers and more than 1,800 people tasked with evaluating veterans’ claims for benefits.

“Congress needs to continue to crack down on the Administration’s abuse and weaponization of personnel policy and address its unilateral cuts in federal capacity,” the think tank concluded. “Otherwise, the delivery of services and programs that Congress chooses to fund will continue to deteriorate, and everyone, including veterans, will continue to feel the worsening impact.”

The Trump administration has only walked back its past cuts to veterans services when facing intense pressure. On Thursday Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins ended a controversial VA policy that lowered veterans’ disability ratings and subsequent monthly compensation.

“DAV is extremely disappointed and alarmed by VA’s decision to issue an interim final rule today that could potentially reduce disability compensation for millions of disabled veterans,” Coleman Nee, national commander of Disabled American Veterans, said prior to Trump’s reversal.

In addition to rolling back veterans benefits, Trump is also accused of politicizing the military. The Atlantic's Missy Ryan, who has covered 10 defense secretaries, recently wrote that she has never seen anything like Trump Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s political actions, such as trying to penalize veterans such as Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) for their political speech.

"Expanding the military’s ability to control veterans’ speech would be a major and historic reversal of basic freedoms," Ryan wrote. "Retired service members turned public officials have a long history of criticizing Pentagon leaders in ways those leaders might find objectionable."

She added, "If the government prevails, the silencing of longtime service members would be like barring retired doctors from opining on health policy. When debating matters of war and peace, he said, it serves the public to hear from the very people who have served on the front lines — and lived through the consequences."

Gen. Stanley McChrystal (Ret.) recently told The New York Times something similar, arguing that“once lost, the legitimacy of a military that reflects and represents all Americans will be difficult to recover." Meanwhile MS NOW's Steve Benen wrote that Trump's partisan speeches to the military erode “a foundational, bedrock principle of the United States. Partisan, ideological and electoral considerations must be utterly irrelevant to what the military is and how it functions. It is nevertheless a principle for which Trump appears to have no use, creating an untenable dynamic."

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10 25 mma shutdown

fox Business host Larry Kudlow urges Trump to seize on the shutdown to fire up to 500,000 more federal workers 10/07/25

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-business-host-larry-kudlow-urges-trump-seize-shutdown-fire-500000-more-federal-workers)

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AN 9 25

To many of President Donald Trump's hardcore MAGA supporters, his second presidency is bringing about a variety of reforms at a rapid pace — from downsizing federal government agencies to carrying out mass deportations. But Trump's opponents on both the left and the right counter that his policies are inflicting considerable damage on the United States in a wide variety of areas, including the economy, health care, civil liberties, and national security.

One of those opponents is New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall.

In his September 9 column, Edsall draws a distinction between "damage" that is permanent and "damage" that can be fixed.

READ MORE:'Come over here weenie': Video shows GOP congressman taunting protester before altercation

"As President Trump continues his march through America's democratic institutions," Edsall warns, "trampling constitutional restraints and silencing dissent, one of the most pressing questions is: What damage is beyond repair, and what can still be undone?"

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To answer that question, Edsall interviewed political experts ranging from New York University law professor Sam Issacharoff to the Brookings Institution's William Galston.

Issacharoff told Edsall, "The dismissal of career experts, the dismantling of long horizon science projects are examples of what cannot be recreated. What happens if tensions resurface between North and South Korea or between India and Pakistan? Who guides policy if the state and defense departments lose their experts? This is something where the next administration cannot simply reopen the spigot and recreate. Expertise is long to create and fast to destroy."

Galston believes that Trump has inflicted "irreparable" damage on everything from international relations to science.

READ MORE:This could end the galling stupidity that keeps Trump in power

"Most of what's irreparable has occurred in programs and policies that affect our relations with the rest of the world," Galston told Edsall. "Trump has upended the system of multilateral trade relations that the United States created and sustained after World War II, and there's no going back. Most serious of all, Trump has destroyed the trust the United States built up over decades as the guarantor of European security, of support for democracy and human rights, and provider of global public goods such as freedom of the seas…. There has been some irreparable damage on the home front as well."

Galston continued, "The most serious, in my judgment — the destruction of America's reputation as the best place in the world for the most promising scientists and innovators of various kinds to conduct research. The evisceration of funding for basic research will be hard to reverse without restoring some bipartisan agreement about the importance of knowledge and expertise. I'm not holding my breath."

Trump insists that his administration's downsizing of federal government agencies is targeting "waste, fraud and abuse," but Max Stier — chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service — counters that Trump's policies are depriving the federal government of a considerable amount of expertise.

The federal government, Stier noted, has lost "200,000 civil servants with an expected 100,000 more by end of year."

Stier told Edsall, "We have been deprived of both the most experienced public servants and the next generation we so desperately need. The harm to our nation is incalculable…. At least as damaging, they have made clear through mass firings that federal employees risk losing their jobs for speaking truth and for choosing the law or constitution over an order from a political appointee."

According to Edsall, Brookings' Robert E. Litman was even more "pessimistic" than the other interviewees.

Litman told Edsall, "By the end of Trump's term…. even if he dies and (Vice President JD) Vance takes over, there will be nothing left of the America we knew four years before. All institutions, norms, government — you name it, all of it gone. The political-societal equivalent of a neutron bomb. It will take far more than the next four years, if Democrats get a chance, to rebuild it."

READ MORE: 'Disturbing': Top Dem says new Trump-Epstein photo 'more incriminating' than birthday book

*Thomas Edsall's full New York Times column is available at this link (subscription required).

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OMFG

AN 7 25

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's decision Friday to eliminate its scientific research arm drew horrified responses from public health experts and climate advocates, who warned that the Trump administration is targeting the foundation of the department's work to shield Americans from hazardous chemicals, toxic pollution, and drinking water contaminants.

"This is grim news," said Adam Gaffney, an ICU doctor at the Cambridge Health Alliance. "For decades, the EPA's Office of Research and Development has produced the science that underlies the regulations and technologies that protect us from innumerable hazards."

"You can't put a number on the lives that it has saved. Now Trump and Zeldin are killing it," Gaffney added, referring to the president's handpicked EPA administrator.

Since taking charge at the EPA, Lee Zeldin has moved aggressively to implement President Donald Trump's executive orders aimed at gutting the agency's staff and freeing oil and gas corporations from regulatory restraints.

The agency will soon have 12,448 employees, after starting the year with more than 16,000. Staffers at the targeted research office—which had more than 800 employees as of earlier this week—reportedly learned of what one public health expert called "the ultimate Friday night purge" through the EPA's public press release.

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In the statement, Zeldin said the elimination of the Office of Research and Development would help "ensure the agency is better equipped than ever to deliver on our core mission of protecting human health and the environment."

But scientists said the closure of the research office would have the opposite impact, leaving the agency's ability to protect the environment and public health badly compromised.

Gretchen Goldman, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that "it is absolutely devastating that Trump officials would shut down this office in its entirety."

"Science, data, and research underpin all of EPA's work, from protections from harmful chemicals to air quality standards to safe drinking water. It's hard to see how EPA can fulfill its mission without its scientific research arm," said Goldman. "The nation enjoys a cleaner environment thanks to the decades of high-quality research coming out of this office. Our nation cannot let this stand. Members of Congress must act."

In his public messaging, Zeldin has deemphasized the EPA's fundamental responsibility to protect the environment, instead casting the agency as a promoter of "energy dominance"—the slogan Trump administration officials have used to describe the president's commitment to boosting fossil fuel drilling.

Earlier this year, Zeldin boasted about launching "the biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history," targeting power plant rules, Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, and other regulations.

"Out in the open, Zeldin's EPA has been dismantling protections against precisely the sorts of dangers that right-wingers warn are coming from alleged deep-state conspiracies: toxic, cancer-causing chemicals that corporations have lobbied to freely inject into our air, water, food, and bodies," The New Republic's Kate Aronoff wrote in a recent column.

"Among the broader suite of regulations Zeldin's EPA has promised to roll back," Aronoff wrote, "is one that would require coal-fired power plant operators to upgrade wastewater treatment facilities, limiting their ability to freely discharge toxins like mercury, arsenic, selenium, lead, and bromide and to threaten local drinking water supplies."

NOW READ:'Like an open fire hose': Trump ripped as cracks show in MAGA media

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AN 5 25 STATES N

Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump, with the help of billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has sought to vastly reduce the number of government workers through mass firings, drawing concern, criticism and several legal challenges.

According to a report from Reuters, Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, an advisory body created through an executive order, has prompted the firing, severance and early retirement of more than 260,000 government employees. However, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston has issued a temporary restraining order, blocking efforts to restructure the federal government.

In March, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his own DOGE-related cuts, aiming to terminate 20,000 full time employees and reorganize the department’s 28 divisions to 15. The department has also closed its regional offices in Boston, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco and Seattle, halving its total regional facilities.

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of Health and Human Services, testifies during his Senate Finance Committee confirmation hearing at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Jan. 29, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

However, a coalition of 20 attorneys general, including Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, have taken legal action against Kennedy and several department officials, arguing these cuts would functionally dismantle the DHHS.

If the court doesn’t provide immediate relief, and the case is allowed to play out, Nessel warned that these cuts could cause “immeasurable harm” to the nation and its health system.

“You’re essentially leaving the agency, as a whole, completely dysfunctional by eliminating so many departments or regions, you know entire offices just wiped off the map and, of course, getting rid of some people with some incredible expertise,” Nessel told the Michigan Advance

The DHHS is eliminating roughly 3,500 employees at the Food and Drug Administration, 2,400 at the Centers for Disease Control, 1,200 at the National Institutes of Health and 300 at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

It will also work to consolidate the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health, Health Resources and Services Administration, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry and National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health under the new Administration for a Healthy America.

Public health and infectious diseases know no borders, Nessel said, warning that the decision to shutter regional health programs, close CDC labs and close all 10 of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services’ regional offices jeopardizes public health in every community.

“Also it’s just a flagrant violation of the law. Disregards the separation of powers, and it places this new burden now, of course, on the states, because there are certain things that you rely upon the federal government to do, especially in terms of coordinating efforts between the states,” Nessel said.

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“Let’s say you have an outbreak of a new variant in bird flu that could impact the entire country. Maybe that happens in Vermont. Is Vermont supposed to coordinate that response with Michigan? You know, it’s the CDC that does that. How are we supposed to make up for that?” Nessel questioned.

While the state has its own lab testing capabilities, the federal government and its labs act as a conduit for sharing data with the states and across the nation, as well as monitoring other countries.

“They fill this incredibly important role in terms of preventing the next global pandemic and mitigating it here in Michigan. And it’s a burden that, frankly, the state simply can’t sustain. It’s the reason why we have a federal government,” Nessel said.

Additionally, it’s the federal government’s job to ensure its laws are enforced, Nessel said, and Congress delegates money to ensure those laws are complied with. Deciding to withhold those funds and cut staffing without regard for which workers are essential, and shutting down offices without regard for whether the department can continue to comply with federal law not only violates the law and the Constitution in a myriad of ways, Nessel contends, but it compromises the safety and health of people in Michigan.

While Kennedy said the intent of the cuts was to address waste and inefficiency within the department, Nessel said the argument doesn’t hold water due to the way the DHHS approached its firings.

“It’s not as if it took any significant period of time to evaluate, you know, is this really a necessary function of the government, and do we really need this to fulfill the mission of this agency? There were no determinations of any kind made like that” Nessel said, pointing to comments Kennedy made to the media where he admitted 20% of cuts at the agency were a mistake, and would need to be reinstated.

[VID] Healso admitted he had forgone a line-by-line review of each employee’s jobs because “it takes too long, and you lose political momentum.”

Among those cuts were doctors and the administrator of the World Trade Center Health program, which certify illnesses in first responders and survivors of the 9/11 terrorist attacks as part of the requirements of the Zadroga Act, with the New York Daily News reporting nearly all 16 employees cut from the program had been rehired as of May 7, including the program’s director, James Howard.

“If you were more careful and cautious before you fired them in the first place, maybe we wouldn’t have this issue,” Nessel said.

The case filed by the attorneys general points to several other examples of offices impacted by the cuts, including the Food and Drug Administration missing a vaccine application deadline and canceling a critical test for the bird flu virus, suspending the testing program for a year.

The case also points to Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views and history of promoting misinformation about vaccination.

According to the filing, some FDA employees were told to go home following the March 27 downsizing announcement and prepare for the possibility that they would not be back. If they received a termination email, they would lose access to the building.

“Beginning in the early morning of April 1, 2025, HHS employees in all offices, administrations, agencies and sub-agencies began to receive termination notices. Some employees had not seen their early morning termination email before leaving for the office, and were surprised when they arrived at work to find their access cards had been deactivated,” the case reads.

“Many notices contained errors. For example, some listed incorrect information about workers’ recent performance ratings. At FDA, the listed point of contact for the Equal Employment Opportunity office had departed a month earlier,” it says.

While this case doesn’t directly address that lack of support and protection for employees, several unions and groups of federal employees have taken legal action on these concerns.

“It’s embarrassing and disturbing to see any workers treated like this, but especially, you know, ones that have worked so hard to protect the American people,” Nessel said.

She also pointed to the ways these firings would impact the economy, calling them “penny wise but pound foolish.”

In the announcement, Kennedy promised to lower costs for taxpayers, with the 10,000 person layoff expected to cut down on $1.8 billion a year. However, Nessel said these costs would crop up in other ways.

“What has a bigger impact on the economy than people’s health, you know? If people are too sick to be able to work, that’s a problem,” Nessel said, noting that widespread infectious disease can have a devastating impact on the economy.

“It’s not just that we’re not really saving money. We’re going to lose an unknown amount of money, an untold amount of money, if people who could otherwise have been healthy are not healthy,” Nessel said.

While Michigan is still assembling its state-specific declarations, these firings will also impact the state’s efforts on issues like mental health and create issues in how they distribute resources within their budgets, Nessel said.

“If we’re trying to prioritize and say, ‘Well, how much money are we going to spend on substance abuse, or how much money are we going to spend on mental health treatment?’ It’s kind of important to know how much of it you’re going to get from the federal government. And because this is done in such a chaotic manner, it’s really hard to know,” Nessel said.

In addition to their case on the mass firings, Nessel and 23 other attorneys general filed suit against Kennedy and the DHHS for terminating almost $11 billion in critical public health grants across the country.

That includes $379.3 million in grant funding awarded and owed to the State of Michigan for certain mental health and substance abuse grants and grants from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention meant to support infectious disease control and vaccinations for children and vulnerable adults, among other programs.

Michigan Advance is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor for questions: info@michiganadvance.com.

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'Embarrassment:' Trump admin asks judge to hide it's tactics for mass layoffs

AN 5 25

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an 4 25

Employees at one federal agency were reportedly kept up for more than a day and a half straight due to the demands of a staffer from South African centibillionaire's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

That's according to a Friday article from CNN, which reported on DOGE staffer Gavin Kliger's alleged treatment of workers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The allegations stem from a sworn declaration a CFPB employee made in U.S. District judge Amy Berman Jackson's court anonymously out of fear of retaliation.

In the declaration, the worker stated that Kliger "kept CFPB staffers working for 36 hours straight to send out mass layoff notices" and was apparently "screaming at those he thought weren’t working fast enough." Kliger — who Reuters reported had amplified content from white supremacist Nick Fuentes — has since been ordered to appear at a hearing scheduled for April 28 pertaining to the mass firing of CFPB employees.

READ MORE:Defense Secretary mistakenly shares screenshot of article contradicting his self-praise

On Friday, Judge Jackson ruled that the roughly 1,500 fired CFPB workers (out of approximately 1,700) would have to be reinstated, as she weighed whether their firings were a violation of a prior court ordered preventing DOGE from effectively shutting down the agency aimed at protecting American consumers from financial scams.

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That prior decision ruled that the mass firings of workers at the agency were illegal, as it would prevent the CFPB from meeting its statutory requirements that Congress legislated at the time of its creation. Because the CFPB is a Congressionally authorized agency, it would take an act of Congress to dismantle it.

The Trump administration argued that the mass firings were legitimate, asserting that the CFPB had "pushed well beyond the limits of the law" in its work while "engag[ing] in intrusive and wasteful fishing expedition. Mark Paoletta, who the administration named as the CFPB's chief legal officer, insisted that leaving the CFPB with just 200 employees was sufficient for the agency to fulfull its statutory obligations.

"An approximately 200 person agency allows the Bureau to fulfill its statutory duties and better aligns with the new leadership’s priorities and management philosophy," he said.

READ MORE:'Rapid erosion': Trump's FEMA cuts put hurricane-prone states in a 'really bad situation'

an 4 25

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an 2 25

A secret group of government workers calling themselves #AltGov is trying to fight the Trump administration from within, the Guardian reported Wednesday.

The network is aiming to “expose harmful policies, defend public institutions and equip citizens with tools to push back against authoritarianism,” Lynn Stahl, a contractor for the Department of Veterans Affairs and member of the group, told the Guardian.

The workers have created 40 Bluesky accounts such as Rogue NASA and Alt DHS aiming to share information with the public and combat propaganda. “Promoting health and science and resistance against pseudoscience, disinformation, and fascism,” reads the bio for Alt Health and Human Services. Alt CDC (they/them) is the largest account with 96,000 followers.

READ MORE: WSJ blasts Trump for threatening swing state's economy with tariffs

“#AltGov dates from the firstTrump administration, but it’s even more needed now,” said an anonymous employee of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. She recently created an #AltGov FEMA account.

When the workers got the news that Elon Musk would be asking federal employees to list five things they did the week before, they met on an encrypted app to discuss next steps.

“Within hours the network had agreed on a recommended response: break up the oath federal employees take when hired into five bullet points and send them back in an email: ‘1. I supported and defended the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.’ ‘2. I bore true faith and allegiance to the same,’ and so on,” writes journalist Timothy Pratt.

“Every federal employee takes an oath,” the FEMA employee said. “When I did it, I teared up.” She decided to take part in the movement because “information [from the federal government] is so compromised right now. Everything is going on behind closed doors.”

READ MORE: Revealed: Musk attacked Trump with a profane rant behind his back in the White House

The #AltGov movement began on Twitter during the first Trump administration. The original accounts worked on “sharing information about what was happening inside government – which usually doesn’t get covered as much, because it usually works,” said journalist Amanda Sturgill, author ofWe Are #AltGov: Social Media Resistance From the Inside.

She said they worked together to “provide services the government wasn’t providing,” such as organizing relief for people affected by hurricanes and distributing masks to help protect people from Covid.

The first iteration of #AltGov was “interesting … [because] it kind of stood up a different way of governing by putting it in direct contact with people – a ‘government with the people’. Whether this [version] can take it further depends on how much of the government is left,” Sturgill said.

The group has since moved from X, which is owned by Musk, to Bluesky. “It’s not safe to organize [on X] anymore,” Stahl said.

READ MORE: Republican gets cornered on CNN after insisting budget doesn't include Medicaid cuts

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MMA Charlie Kirk says 90% of federal jobs “should not exist”

02/24/25

  1. ### Charlie Kirk says government workers “operate as worthless parasites on the American taxpayer”

02/24/25

Fox host: Trump voters who are “casualties” of federal layoffs are just part of closing the budget gap

02/24/25

  1. ### Sean Hannity to caller pleading for the jobs of military vets in the federal government: “There will be other opportunities”

02/21/25

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MMA

Right-wing media celebrate the gutting of the federal government as critical agencies are expected to reel from layoffs

Written by Gideon Taaffe & Pete Tsipis

Published 02/20/25

As the Trump administration orders thousands of layoffs of “probationary” federal employees, new reporting shows that many of these firings hit people who had been in public service for years, and some employees are now being rehired because of the critical nature of their jobs — suggesting the layoffs have been rolled out haphazardly. But many right-wing media figures responded by celebrating the layoffs, praising the supposed “line by line” cutting of waste in the federal budget and the mass firings of “entitled” public employees.

The Trump administration is firing thousands of federal employees with little justification

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MMA

  1. ### Fox News' Jeanine Pirro attacks federal employees who “think they're entitled to a job”

02/18/25

Dan Bongino says people need to “take it on the chin” and “sacrifice for a little bit” for Trump’s policies

02/18/25 3:06 PM EST

Angelo Carusone on Deadline White House: MAGA media personalities are trying to intimidate judges and justices to get their way

02/18/25

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AN 2 25 NUKE SECURITY

'Disastrous': Trump’s 'haphazard' mass firings leave 'gaping holes in the government'

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MMA

Fox joins the Trump administration’s war on the veteran-heavy federal workforce

Veterans make up nearly a third of civilian federal workers, the vast majority of whom are employed to assist veterans and the military

Written by Zachary Pleat

Published 02/14/25

Many Fox News personalities have celebrated the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on the federal workforce, which have ranged from offering questionable buyouts, purposefully demoralizing those who choose to remain in their jobs, and mass firings of recent hires.

But the federal workforce is the nation’s single largest employer of American military veterans, and the vast majority of civilian federal employees at Cabinet-level or otherwise major agencies work with veterans or the military.

The Trump administration has gone to war against the federal workforce

//

  1. ### After “disappointing” jobs report, Fox Business guest excitedly predicts future government job losses

02/07/25

  1. ### Fox host to federal workers: “Get a real job”

02/06/25 1:48 PM EST

  1. ### Fox News' Dana Perino calls public sector unions a “new nemesis”

02/11/25

an 2 25

Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order handing an Elon Musk-led commission sweeping power to oversee federal hiring across non-military departments, entrenching what's been described as a "shadow government" spearheaded by an unelected billionaire.

The new order states that the leader of each non-military federal agency "shall develop a data-driven plan" in coordination with the Department of Government Efficiency( DOGE), an advisory body that has infiltrated departments across the U.S. government—and accessed highly sensitive data—as part of an unprecedented effort to gut spending and the federal workforce.

"This hiring plan shall include that new career appointment hiring decisions shall be made in consultation with the agency's DOGE Team Lead, consistent with applicable law," the order continues. "The agency shall not fill any vacancies for career appointments that the DOGE Team Lead assesses should not be filled, unless the Agency Head determines the positions should be filled."

The order also instructs agency directors to prepare for "large-scale" cuts to the federal workforce.

"It's a complete takeover of the federal government by Musk," investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr wrote in response to the executive action.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office with Musk at his side, Trump on Tuesday called the order "very important" and attacked federal judges who "want to try and stop us," alluding to court orders against DOGE's attempt to access vital government systems.

Musk, who is leading DOGE while simultaneously heading companies that are benefiting directly from his work inside the Trump administration, insisted he's not orchestrating a "hostile takeover" of the federal government, declaring that the public voted for "major government reform" and "they are going to get what they voted for."

The mega-billionaire also falsely claimed DOGE has been transparent as it rampages through the federal government.

"In reality," The Guardiannoted, "Musk has taken great pains to conceal how DOGE has operated, starting with his own involvement in the project. Musk himself is a 'special government employee,' which the White House has said means his financial disclosure filing will not be made public. The DOGE team involves about 40 staffers, but the actual number is not known. Staffers have tried to keep their identities private and refused to give their last names to career officials at the agencies they were detailed to."

Trump's latest executive order (EO) is poised to supercharge the Musk-led assault on and total dismantling of federal agencies, from the U.S. Agency for International Development to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

"This new EO signed today appears to create DOGE as a shadow government across the entire federal government," Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memowrote late Wednesday, adding that the order "seems to make Elon as head of DOGE functionally the president or perhaps something more like a prime minister."

Skye Perryman, president and CEO of the advocacy group Democracy Forward, warned in a statement that "this latest attack on public service gives Elon Musk, an unelected, hyper-partisan billionaire, unfettered authority over this country's civil service."

"People and communities across the nation depend on a non-partisan, committed civil service," said Perryman. "Democracy Forward will pursue all legal options available to protect our civil service and the American people from harms that would stem from this executive order."

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1 25 xo NIH DEI creepy snitch

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chris hayes 11 20 24? cheney bush took over intel --> gulf war 2

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Schedule F. Two unions representing government workers, AFGE and AFSCME, have filed lawsuits to block Trump's executive order that would reclassify large numbers of federal employees under Schedule F, which would make it easier for Trump to fire them. You can read more about these lawsuits at Reuters and Democracy Docket.

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After it was announced Tuesday that President Donald Trump's administration is offering nearly 2 million federal workers "the chance to take a 'deferred resignation,'according to NBC News — allowing workers be paid through September — one reporter noted that the message to employees looked familiar.

ABC News White House policy reporter Cheyenne Haslett reported via X: "NEW: The memo sent to government employees this evening offering them buyouts very closely mirrors an email Musk sent to Twitter employees in 2022 — down to the same subject line 'A Fork in the Road.'"

She added, "The 2022 email tells Twitter employees, 'Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.'"

READ MORE:'There’s no clarity': Reporter confronts Trump’s press secretary over federal funding freeze

Furthermore, Haslett wrote, "Compare that to memo: 'The federal workforce should be comprised of the best America has to offer. We will insist on excellence at every level...And another similarity: in the same way the OPM [U.S. Office of Personnel Management] memo requires employees to only respond 'Resign' to the email to seal the deal, Musk asked Twitter employees to 'click yes on the link below' if they wanted to stay on at Twitter."

The email continued, "Whatever decision you make, thank you for your efforts to make Twitter successful," Musk wrote in 2022. And this evening, the closing message to government employees by OPM: 'Whichever path you choose, we thank you for your service to The United States of America,'" Haslett noted.

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AN 1 25

During the 2024 U.S. presidential race, now-President Donald Trump made a concerted effort to distance himself from Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation's 922-page blueprint for a second Trump presidency. Trump reportedly viewed Project 2025 as a major political liability, claiming he had nothing to do with it even though its architects were major allies.

Democratic nominee Kamala Harris hammered Trump aggressively on Project 2025, and her website even had an entire section devoted to the Heritage document and its proposals. Harris, in an October 14, 2024 post on X, formerly Twitter, wrote, "Donald Trump’s Project 2025 Agenda would give him unchecked power to act on his worst instincts — and there will be no one to stop him."

Regardless, Trump narrowly won the election, returning to the White House on January 20, 2025. And according to reporting from 404 Media, some memos from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) "were seemingly written by people" with Project 2025 connections. But the OPM, Mediaite's David Gilmour reports, "scrambled to scrub" those memos.

READ MORE: 'You're a guest': CBS host scolds Lindsey Graham after meltdown over Kash Patel question

404 Media's Samanta Cole, in an article published on January 27, reported, "Some of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) memos sent to federal workers about firing, hiring freezes, and mandatory return to office demands were seemingly written by people who were previously employed by the Heritage Foundation and other conservative think tanks with longstanding loyalties to President Donald Trump, according to metadata on the memos posted by the government online. We know this because the senders of the memos failed to scrub the metadata from those documents, making it easy for anyone to reveal the listed authors of the memos."

But Gilmour, in an article published on January 28, reports that the OPM "scrambled to scrub" the memos "after initial publication of the documents contained metadata revealing they were authored by individuals tied to Project 2025."

"The metadata revealed the authors' identities as individuals affiliated with the Heritage Foundation think tank's Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for reshaping federal governance, according to 404 Media," Gilmour explains. "One memo, titled 'Guidance on Presidential Memorandum Return to In-Person Work' and dated January 24, listed its author as Noah Peters, a senior advisor at OPM and former Trump appointee who served as solicitor for the Federal Labor Relations Authority during Trump's first term."

Gilmour adds, "Another memo, 'Federal Civilian Hiring Freeze Guidance,' was authored by James Sherk, who 404 Media highlights as an architect of the Trump Administration's Schedule F classification, which stripped employment protections from federal workers."

READ MORE:Apocalypse Now: Extreme interpretation of Christian nationalism now guides Pentagon policy

Sherk, according to Gilmour, was "formerly" active in the Heritage Foundation.

"Despite Trump's public denials of involvement with Project 2025 and distancing from the blueprint," Gilmour reports, "the metadata leak is the latest evidence of how he has tapped its contributors for high-ranking roles. Although the OPM deleted the initial documents before uploading amended ones, tech industry researcher Molly White has hosted the original memos on her website in full."

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November 21, 2024, edition of Fox News' The Story with Martha MacCallum

MARTHA MACCALLUM (HOST): I just want to read one other quote from this Wall Street Journal piece. Listen to this carefully, "Most government enforcement decisions and discretionary expenditures are not made by the democratically elected president or even his political appointees but by millions of unelected, unappointed civil servants within government agencies who view themselves as immune from firing thanks to civil service protections." How are they going to do this?

DAGEN MCDOWELL (GUEST): So -- I encourage everyone to read this Elon and Vivek piece --

MACCALLUM: Absolutely, and then read it again to understand how this is going to go.

MCDOWELL: So, this is, in their words, their north star for reform is what you hit on, is the U.S. Constitution and it focuses on two recent critical Supreme Court decisions. It is West Virginia v. the EPA and then Loper Bright. And this, in essence, these two decisions say government agencies cannot impose regulations dealing with major economic and policy questions unless Congress has authorized them to do so. And Loper Bright more recently, again, said you cannot -- the federal agencies, the courts cannot defer to them for their own rule making authority. It is Congress who is in charge.

So, they are literally planning to go in, find all of these regulations, potentially going back years and years and years, that have grown out of this vast, bureaucratic regulatory state that were not authorized by Congress and just get rid of them. And that leads them toward all of the individuals who should not be working in the federal government.

And Martha, I cannot even comprehend how incredible a burden this will lift off of every single business in this nation, particularly small businesses. This is a renaissance in America.

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Trump is planning to appoint Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist who has plotted to remake the federal workforce in MAGA’s image, to serve as his administration’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, according to CBS News. Vought held the same position during Trump’s first term. Since leaving office he has been a leading architect of Project 2025, a sprawling plan to provide staffing and policy options to the next Republican administration.

In his role at Project 2025, Vought was instrumental in ensuring that decimating the ranks of federal civil service became a conservative priority. He wrote the second chapter in Project 2025’s policy book — Mandate for Leadership — titled: “Executive Office of the President of the United States.” In it, he argued that “a President today assumes office to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences—or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country.”

As part of his anti-woke crusade, Vought has repeatedly defended and promoted Christian nationalism, at one point calling for an “army” of right-wing activists with “biblical worldview” to staff the next Republican administration. He wrote an op-ed for Newsweek in 2021 with the headline “Is There Anything Actually Wrong With 'Christian Nationalism?’” More recently, Politico reported that a document from the Center for Renewing America — a MAGA-aligned think tank Vought founded — listed “Christian nationalism” as a top priority for a second Trump term.

While at the helm of the Center for Renewing America, Vought has been outspoken in his advocacy of Schedule F — a scheme to reclassify career civil servants as political appointees. Trump attempted to implement Schedule F in the waning days of his first term, but its effects were blunted by his loss in 2020. If his incoming administration moves forward with the plan, which seems all but inevitable, as many as 50,000 career staffers could be replaced with MAGA loyalists. (Some other estimates put the number closer to 20,000.)

Vought has championed the use of congressional rules to defund and remove individual government employees for punishment and deploying “ideological purity tests” to ensure federal workers are loyal to Trump.

During a recent interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Vought argued that the “whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out.”

Following a broad backlash to Project 2025, Vought was caught on hidden video discussing his work at the initiative and how it might play if Trump returned to the White House.

“Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies, and we are working doggedly on that,” Vought said. “Whether it’s destroying agencies’ notion of independence, that they’re independent from the president.”

In the interview, Vought claimed that he’d been working on “about 350 different documents that are regulations and things of that nature” for a future Trump administration.

“You may say, ‘OK, DHS, we want to have the largest deportation — what are your actual memos that a secretary sends out to do it?’ Like, there’s an executive order, regulations, secretarial memos,” Vought said. “Those are the types of things that need to be thought through so you’re not — you’re not having to scramble or do that later on.”

This early preparation includes creating documents to facilitate the “largest deportation in history” and to deploy the military to “maintain law and order” against civilian protesters. Vought elaborated that the mass deportations were part of a plan to “end multiculturalism” in the country.

As a hardline conservative, Vought has pushed to implement harsh austerity measures throughout the country. The Washington Post reported that Vought advocates for eliminating trillions of dollars of reductions in “anti-poverty programs such as housing, health care and food assistance.” He has called for massive cuts to Medicaid and floated future cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

Toward that end, Vought and his colleagues at the Center for Renewing America are leading proponents of a radical interpretation of executive authority that claims the president can unilaterally refuse to spend money allocated by Congress. Known as the “impoundment” power, Vought and his fellow travelers assert that a 1974 law that mandates presidents spend money Congress has allocated — passed after President Richard Nixon refused to spend federal funds for clean water and schools — is unconstitutional. This theory, if Trump acts on it, would centralize budgeting power within the Oval Office and tilt the balance of power between the president and Congress even further towards the executive branch.

Aside from slashing the United States’ very limited safety net, Vought’s think tank released a budget proposal for fiscal year 2023 that would unleash the FBI against Trump’s declared enemies and “thwart the increasing societal destruction caused by progressive policies at the state and local levels that have defunded police, refused to prosecute criminals, and released violent felons into communities.”

Now, as he reprises his role as the head of OMB, he will wield considerable influence within the Trump administration and will almost certainly play a central role in the likely purge of the federal workforce.

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:{:{Alternet+ no lnx}:

Trump’s appointees are the Trojan horse that could lead to America’s strategic collapse

}:

Thom Hartmann November 21, 2024

The mainstream media is baffled: Why would Trump promote candidates to oversee critical agencies with millions of employees and multi-billion-dollar budgets who have little to no management experience and have openly expressed hostility toward the institutions they’ll oversee?

I’ve seen legendary reporter Bob Woodward, who wrote several books about Trump, on three different TV shows this week asking to the effect of, “What could Trump possibly gain from these incompetent appointments?

If he just wanted loyalty, there’s no shortage of rational, competent members of the military and intelligence community who’re loyal to Trump.

So why is he selecting people like Hegseth, Gaetz, and Gabbard to run agencies that could directly involve confrontations with Russia?

Trump wants Gaetz for the job as our nation’s top law enforcement officer, Attorney General (who oversees the FBI), where he could block the FBI from investigating Trump’s embrace of Putin and Russia’s spying and disinformation efforts here in the US.

Why? Gaetz, after all, has called for Trump to “defund, get rid of, abolish the FBI…”; he apparently hates the agency that investigated and threatened to prosecute him.

Pete Hegseth, who Trump wants to put in charge of our Department of Defense, is openly critical of our NATO allies, saying they are, “self-righteous and impotent nations asking us to honor outdated and one-sided defense arrangements they no longer live up to.”

:

Who else hates NATO? Vladimir Putin. Hegseth has also echoed Putin’s assertion that he doesn’t have designs on the Baltic states, arguing that he doubted Putin would go “much further” than the Polish border.

And both Hegseth and Gaetz have a history of lurid, possibly illegal sexual activity that could subject them to blackmail by a foreign power…like Russia.

Tulsi Gabbard, who Trump wants to put in charge of all 18 of America’s intelligence agencies — giving her full access to America’s darkest secrets and our spies buried deep within Russia and China — has repeatedly and openly embraced Vladimir Putin’s positions on world affairs.

Regarding Ukraine, she argued that Russia was forced to invade that country because, echoing Putin, she falsely claimed Ukraine was developing (with US help) biological weapons and conspiring with NATO to put troops on Russia’s border.

Former Secretary of State Clinton said Russia was “grooming” Gabbard, and Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz was equally blunt:

“There’s no question I consider her someone who is likely a Russian asset.”

And JD Vance, also selected by Trump and now our vice-president elect, has famously said:

“I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” no doubt bringing cheers from the Kremlin.

So, what’s really going on here?

Is it possible that Trump isn’t trolling us or trying to do “dominance plays” with Congress, but actually wants these people to injure or destroy the agencies he’s putting them in charge of?

Is it even conceivable that Trump, in league with Putin (or at least sharing his goal of weakening and damaging America), actually wants our intelligence, defense, and investigative agencies to be gutted to the point of impotence?

That these appointees could be Trojan horses he’s planning to use to destroy America from within?

That he’s that angry with the country whose past leaders have ridiculed him, whose elites have rejected him all his life, and that has even tried to put him in prison?

That he’d like our country — which he disdains — to be brought to its knees?

That his loyalty, perhaps for years, has been to a country and system of government very different from America and what our founders envisioned?

In 2019 The Washington Post revealed that, throughout his presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Russia’s President Putin (over 20 have been identified so far, including one just days before the 2020 election).

Just months ago, we discovered that he and Elon Musk have both been having regular, secret conversations with Putin for at least the past two years.

This embrace of a foreign dictator first cranked into visibility in 2016.

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documented more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump 2016 campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings just leading up to that year’s election.

The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort — who was previously paid tens of millions by Vladimir Putin’s people to install a pro-Putin puppet as Ukraine’s president in 2010 — has admitted that he was regularly feeding secret inside-campaign strategy and polling information to Russian intelligence via the oligarch who typically paid him on their behalf.

Throughout the campaign, he let them know where Trump needed help, and when. Speculation is that they used that information for their successful 2016 Facebook campaigns.

Trump pardoned Manafort, which got him out of prison; he’s still fabulously rich from his work for Russia.

As The New York Times noted in 2020:

“[I]nvestigators found enough there to declare that Mr. Manafort created ‘a grave counterintelligence threat’ by sharing inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and [pro-Russian] Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served.”

There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history — one could argue it easily exceeds Benedict Arnold’s audacity — and bringing documents to Mar-a-Lago is just the tip of the iceberg.

The Washington Post reported two years ago last August that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could severely damage our national security, leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations.

Was he bringing these documents with him to sell? Or just to show to leaders or oligarchs in those countries to impress them? Or for bragging rights to impress dignitaries, businessmen, or ladies he brings back to his room?

Trump doesn’t put all that effort into hauling things around unless it’s extraordinarily important to his ego or he thinks he can make money off them.

“Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel,” The Post noted, “following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.”

When Robert Mueller’s team tried to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia and his possibly sharing sensitive military information with them, they were stonewalled by the Trump administration.

The Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump trying to criminally obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn after his dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit former FBI Director Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

As the Mueller Report noted:

“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.

“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”

It adds, detailing Trump’s specific Obstruction of Justice crimes:

“These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”

There are, after all, credible assertions from American intelligence agencies that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, celebrating a victory they believed they made happen.

And apparently Putin and his intelligence operatives had good reason to be popping the champagne in November, 2016. They were quickly paid off in a big way.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli/American asset/spy to the Russian Ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy.

The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble.

That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that another longtime American spy, this one buried deep inside the Kremlin, was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later):

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.

“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s presidency, 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’ translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the large empty ballroom in which they met.

The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:

“There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”

Three weeks after Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Senator Rand Paul made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a document or package of documents from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown, although Paul told the press he believed it was a “personal” letter of some sort.

Senator Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s and Putin’s side with regard to the Ukraine war: he single-handedly blocked a $40 billion military aid package in the Senate. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, he responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act. He further suggested the FBI may have “planted” Secret documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Ten days after Paul’s trip to Moscow, The New York Times reported that the CIA was worried because their sources inside Moscow had suddenly “gone silent”:

“The full reasons the sources have gone silent are not known,” the Times reported, but Trump having intentionally burned a man working for the FBI — whose job at that time was to find and reveal Russian agents involved in or close to the Trump campaign — may also have had something to do with it:

“[C]urrent and former officials said the exposure of sources inside the United States has also complicated matters,” noted the Times. “This year, the identity of an F.B.I. informant, Stefan Halper, became public after [Trump-loyal MAGA Republican] House lawmakers sought information on him and the White House allowed that information to be shared. Mr. Halper, an American academic based in Britain, had been sent to talk to Trump campaign advisers who were under F.B.I. scrutiny for their ties to Russia.”

Things were picking up the following year, in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump “made promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.

As The Washington Post noted in an article titled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.

The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

But the following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all of our spies) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

Did Trump ever return that document to the intelligence agencies? I can find no record of a news story suggesting that he did. It appears to have vanished.

Perhaps just by coincidence, months after Trump left office with cases of classified documents, The New York Times ran a story with the headline Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants:

“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week,” the Times’ story’s lede began, “about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.

“The message, in an unusual top secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.”

If it turns out the Trump has been acting as an agent for Russia, a Trojan horse right here in America, how long might this have been going on?

Czechoslovakia’s Státní bezpečnost (StB) first started paying attention to Trump back in 1977, as documented by the German newspaper Bildwhen the StB’s files were declassified.

It began when Trump married Czech model Ivana Zelnickova, his first wife, recently buried on his golf course in New Jersey after she fell down a flight of stairs and died.

Czechoslovakia at that time was part of the Warsaw Pact with the Soviet Union, and Ivana and her family had been raised as good communists. Now that a Czech citizen was married into a wealthy and prominent American family, the StB saw an opportunity and started tracking Trump virtually from his engagement.

As 2016 and 2018 investigations by The Guardian found:

“Ivana’s father, Miloš Zelníček, gave regular information to the local StB office about his daughter’s visits from the US and on his celebrity son-in-law’s career in New York. Zelníček was classified as a ‘conspiratorial’ informer. His relationship with the StB lasted until the end of the communist regime.”

An investigative reporting breakthrough by Craig Unger for his book American Kompromat led Unger to Uri Shvets, a former KGB spy who’d been posted to Washington, DC for years as a correspondent for the Soviet news agency TASS.

Shvets told the story — from his own knowledge — of how Trump and Ivana visited Moscow in 1987 and were essentially recruited or seduced by the KGB, a trip corroborated by Luke Harding in his book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.

Their trip was coordinated by Intourist, the Soviet travel agency that was a front for the KGB, and the Trumps’ handlers regaled Donald and Ivana with Soviet talking points, presumably about things like the horrors of NATO.

The KGB’s psychological profile of Trump had determined he was vulnerable to flattery and not a deep thinker, so they told him repeatedly how brilliant he was and that he should run for president in the US.

Much to the astonishment and jubilation of the KGB, Trump returned from Moscow to the US to give a Republican presidential campaign speech that fall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

He then purchased a large ad in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe on September 1, 1987 that questioned America’s ongoing support of Japan and NATO, both thorns in the side of the USSR and their Chinese allies.

Trump’s ad laid it on the line:

“Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests? ... The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.”

As The Guardian reported in 2021:

“The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful ‘active measure’ executed by a new KGB asset.

“’It was unprecedented,’ [Shvets said.] … It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.’”

Meanwhile, Putin was making friends with powerful influence over American foreign policy.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who flipped his nation into a strongman neofascist state following an unsuccessful attempted coup in 2016 (he imprisoned and tortured numerous journalists and political opponents), has been deepening his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin ever since that US election year.

In 2017, Erdoğan apparently gained access to America’s deepest secrets by secretly paying off General Michael Flynn even as Flynn became Trump’s National Security Advisor; he also had at least one secret phone conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak after Flynn started working in the White House.

Flynn pleaded guilty in December of 2017 to “willfully and knowingly” making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to the FBI about one of those conversations with Russian Ambassador Kislyak. Flynn was also charged as an unregistered agent of a foreign government (Turkey) while working in the White House: prosecutors said he had taken about a half-million dollars from Erdoğan.

Around the time he was leaving office, Trump pardoned Flynn, essentially burying the entire story.

The plot thickened when America learned, from a blockbuster 2022 report in Axios by Jonathan Swan, that just before leaving office, back on October 21, 2020, Trump had signed Executive Order 13957.

It would allow him to instantly fire as many as 50,000 senior federal employees encompassing the Civil Service management of every government agency including the FBI, CIA, NSA, large parts of the Pentagon, and DHS, and allow Trump to replace all of them with nakedly political loyalist appointees.

And it wouldn’t stop there. As Donald Moynihan wrote for Slate about this “Schedule F” Executive Order:

“Schedule F would burn down the civil service system. It would be a government of the lawless leading the incompetent. …

“Government data unfavorable to the administration would be suppressed or altered. Public statements about what government actors are actually doing would become rarer and less believable. And questionable actions by the security forces to target political enemies and protect friends could become routine.

“Career public employees would be forced to choose between their oath to the Constitution—in effect, their oath to serve the public—and keeping their job. They will have their loyalty questioned based on which political organizations they associated with in college, or voter registration, or social media activity. Some will not go along with the program. They will be fired. Or never join the government in the first place.”

Trump didn’t have the time to push that executive order through the federal bureaucracy, but it gives us a clear picture of his vision for a second Trump administration, particularly since this is still on the Project 2025 agenda.

Campaigning to destroy NATO; opposing aid to Ukraine; demolishing the free world’s confidence in America’s ability to keep top secret information confidential; utterly destroying our senior-most intelligence and military agencies; installing Trojan horses to lead them: Trump’s goal appears to be, to paraphrase Ron DeSantis, to “Make America Russia.”

What are Trump’s real goals with these appointments?

As the old saying goes, “Watch what he does, not what he says.”

NOW READ: Until there’s a liberal media apparatus, the Democrats will live in Trump’s America

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One of the many controversial proposals in Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation's widely criticized 920-page blueprint for a second Trump Administration — is firing tens of thousands of federal government employees and replacing them with an army of unquestioning Trump/MAGA loyalists.

Trump, during his 2024 presidential campaign, claimed that he had nothing to do with Project 2025. Yet the parallels between Project 2025 and his own Agenda 47 are easy to pinpoint, including a game plan for giving the United States' federal workforce a top-to-bottom MAGA makeover.

Author/journalist Jay Michaelson, in article published by MSNBC's website on November 18, grapples with the question: Just how easy — or difficult — would it be for Trump to fire 50,000 federal government employees and replace them with Trump loyalists who would take an oath to Trump and the far-right MAGA movement?

READ MORE:Republican says 'colored people' wouldn't have basketball if not for Abraham Lincoln

"One of the linchpins of Project 2025 — the collection of policy proposals that some in Trump World have now warmly embraced after spending six months claiming they had nothing to do with it — is the planned replacement of up to 50,000 career civil servants with political appointees loyal to President-elect Donald Trump," Michaelson explains. "But it's not an idea confined only to Project 2025: Trump's own 'Agenda 47' calls for an 'executive order restoring the president's authority to fire rogue bureaucrats,' and Trump himself said of civil servants, 'They're destroying this country. They're crooked people, they're dishonest people. They're going to be held accountable.'"

Michaelson continues, "This position is at odds with American public opinion. A survey conducted by the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, released last March, found that 87 percent of Americans said that 'having a nonpartisan civil service is important for having a strong American democracy.'"

The author/journalist goes on to say, however, that "there are good reasons to doubt that" Trump can fire tens of thousands of federal civil service workers.

"Statutorily," Michaelson notes, "the civil service as we know it today was created in 1883 by the Pendleton Act, passed to reform government and end the patronage system where political allies and donors were rewarded with cushy government jobs. The Pendleton Act envisioned a civil service made up of experts who knew their fields, had to pass exams to demonstrate competence and could not be fired without due process. But in 1978, another law, the Civil Service Reform Act, created a loophole, now contained in Section 7511 of Title 5 of the U.S. Code, that exempted from civil service protections anyone 'whose position has been determined to be of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character,' the same language used in the Trump order from 2020…. At the very least, the purge won't happen overnight."

READ MORE:The band is back together: Here's what's next for the controversial Georgia MAGA election board

Michaelson adds, "Trump's order will be challenged immediately, a subsequent regulation will take months to draft and review. From there, what will happen is anyone’s guess — like so much else in this strange and unprecedented time."

READ MORE:Trump's bamboozle — and the real reason behind his controversial cabinet picks

*Jay Michalson's full analysis for MSNBC is available at this link.

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former President Donald Trump's allies are working to reshape American law into a weapon to be used against their political enemies, wrote Jesse Wegman in a scathing editorial for The New York Times.

Trump's pick of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) underscores this, he wrote, because Vance embodies the far-right's commitment to a key goal of the controversial Project 2025 plan to transform the government into an authoritarian loyalty cult to the GOP.

Vance, wrote Wegman, "predicted ... that the former president, who had been recently disgraced by his insurrectionary attempt to overturn the 2020 election, would nevertheless run again in 2024. Should Mr. Trump win, Mr. Vance said, he had some advice: 'Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.' And if the courts ruled against him? No problem, Mr. Vance said: Just blow them off."

This is already happening, wrote Wegman — and another of Trump's appointees, District Judge Aileen Cannon, is showing how it will work in her move to dismiss the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, which special counsel Jack Smith is already moving to appeal.

In her decision, Cannon concluded Smith, "Was not validly appointed to his post because no federal law authorizes the appointment of someone from outside the Justice Department to perform that task," wrote Wegman, noting she based this entirely on a non-majority concurrence from Justice Clarence Thomas in the case granting Trump a presumption of immunity in a separate case.

ALSO READ:'Keep lying': Late night Trump rant about Harris quickly turns against him

"As a matter of law and fact, this is not merely wrong, it is flagrantly, embarrassingly wrong ... It is not a close or complicated legal question" — indeed, the Supreme Court ruled the law allows this in 1974, and Cannon pretends they didn't.

These sorts of machinations by Vance and Cannon are exactly what to expect the whole government to become should Trump get his way, Wegman concluded ominously.

"This is what a second Trump term would look like," he wrote. "Ambitious judges who may not have been Trump loyalists at first will watch what’s been happening in recent days and get the message about what it takes to advance their careers. In this way, Judge Cannon embodies the future that Mr. Vance described in 2021. She is part of a legal elite raised on Trumpism that will use their perches in the judiciary and legal world to enforce a one-sided version of law that is about power and outcomes over any liberal principle."

In other words, he said, this is a reality where "the rule of law is for suckers or, worse, only for specific people. Our people."

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Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and others in MAGA media have recently praised disgraced Sen. Joe McCarthy and his blacklists, a tactic that Project 2025 partner organization the American Accountability Foundation is attempting to bring to the White House should Donald Trump win in November.

According to The Associated Press, AAF is planning to create and publicly post a list of “100 names of government workers to a website this summer to show a potential new administration who might be … ripe for scrutiny, reclassifications, reassignments or firings,” with a focus on “those in senior executive positions who could put up roadblocks to Trump’s plans for tighter borders and more deportations.”

The plan is reportedly underwritten by a $100,000 grant from conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation as part of Project 2025, its far-reaching and extreme effort to provide policy and personnel recommendations for a potential second Trump administration. One of Project 2025’s top priorities is the implementation of “Schedule F,” a scheme to remove job protections from federal workers by reclassifying career staffers as political appointees — a direct attack on federal unions that could be used to fire civil servants deemed insufficiently pro-Trump.

AAF is one of more than 100 conservative organizations on Project 2025’s advisory board, and its initiative — synergistically dubbed Project Sovereignty 2025 — is the latest broadside against the 2.2 million people who work for the federal government. The AP article notes that the group’s list of what Heritage referred to as “anti-American bad actors” echoes the blacklist era of McCarthy, the disgraced anti-communist crusader whose name became synonymous with one of the most repressive periods in U.S. history.

Notably, MAGA media have been attempting to rehabilitate McCarthy’s illiberal tactics and goals using rhetoric that often dovetails with justifications for AAF’s project.

In a Decemberinterview,

vid]

Project 2025’s Schedule F and AAF’s proposed blacklist are clear, direct descendants of the literal McCarthyism that MAGA media figures are so quick to praise. The McCarthy era saw massive purges of left-wing federal employees as part of the Cold War’s rightward shift in national politics, halting the potential for American social democracy and helping to plant the seeds for the neoliberal turn of the 1970s and the ensuing rise in inequality that accompanied it.

McCarthy and fellow anti-communists like FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover also directed their oppressive tactics toward gay people — and those suspected or accused of being gay — who worked for the federal government during a period known as the Lavender Scare. McCarthy “directly linked homosexuality and Communism,” depicting gay people working in government as a national security threat. Historians estimate that between 5,000 and 10,000 federal workers were forced to resign during this period, often behind closed doors for fear of their gay identity — real or perceived — becoming public.

McCarthyist attacks on workers extended far beyond federal government employees. The broader Red Scare was disastrous for unions and the working class, hollowing out organized labor’s power and setting the stage for the wage stagnation and exploding wealth inequality that have defined the United States since the early 1980s. As leading historian of McCarthyism Ellen Schrecker writes, “labor's declining percentage of the workforce” had its “roots in that grim moment."

MAGA media’s celebration of that “grim moment” for workers further highlights the superficial rhetoric of right-wing populism.

Now, Project 2025 has taken up the mantle of targeting the federal workforce — and the working class at large— with effects that could be just as long lasting. As Roberts told Bannon in June, “What we're doing here is building not just for 2025, Steve, but for the next century in the United States."

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Staffers who worked for former President Donald Trump are reportedly now assembling a database of MAGA loyalists in preparation for an unprecedented purge of federal workers, should Trump win a second term in 2024.

According to a new Axios report, former Trump advisors Stephen Miller and Johnny McEntee are working alongside the Heritage Foundation — one of Washington, DC's most established conservative think tanks — to build "a pre-vetted, pro-Trump army" of approximately 54,000 people to quickly staff the federal government in key domestic policy roles. Axios cofounders Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen wrote that "social media histories are already being plumbed" to screen potential candidates.

"We're told immense, intense attention will be given to the social-media histories of anyone being considered for top jobs," VandeHei and Allen wrote. "Those queasy about testing the limits of Trump's power will get flagged and rejected."

VandeHei and Allen added that the undertaking involves "hundreds of people... spending tens of millions of dollars" in order to "rip off the restraints imposed on the previous 46 presidents."

The effort to pre-screen potential federal workers under a second Trump term is a key part of Project 2025, which Heritage has spearheaded in coordination with dozens of other conservative organizations. Under Project 2025, executive power under a Republican administration would be drastically expanded, and the typically apolitical federal civil service — what Trump calls "the deep state" — would be packed full of far-right apparatchiks with the goal of governing to achieve conservative political goals. Heritage President Kevin Roberts told Axios that Project 2025 is "orders of magnitude" bigger than any other transition plan assembled by a party out of power.

Earlier this year the New York Times reportedthat one of the first priorities of Project 2025 would be to re-enact Trump's "Schedule F" executive order, which was issued just two weeks before the 2020 election and that President Biden rescinded just days after his inauguration. While presidents are usually able to appoint roughly 4,000 people to various administrative roles throughout the federal government, Schedule F would have bulldozed various legal protections for federal workers that would allow a president to replace approximately 50,000 additional staff across all federal agencies. The Times noted that Project 2025's goal of screening potential new staffers has been assisted with AI provided by tech giant Oracle.

Trump has indicated that if elected to a second term, he would carry out various acts of vengeance, including weaponizing the Department of Justice against his political opponents. The Times reported over the weekend that Trump would also greatly expand immigration crackdowns, enabling the Department of Homeland Security to carry out large-scale raids, detain immigrants at industrial-size camps and deport millions of immigrants every year.

READ MORE: 'Time to be very very afraid': Columnist warns Trump plans to carry out acts of vengeance in 2nd term

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The shocking Republican plan to dismantle the American government

Thom Hartmann

September 01, 2023

This article was paid for by AlterNet subscribers. Not a subscriber? Try us and go ad-free for $1. Prefer to give a one-time tip? Click here.

As we learned from last week’s Republican debates, the leading candidates for the GOP nomination all appear to agree on a broad plan to gut American government and replace it with a strongman president and corporate rule.

The modern administrative state, sometimes called the “welfare state” by Republicans, was largely created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in response to the Republican Great Depression of the early 1930s. And every day since FDR was sworn into office on March 4, 1933, the GOP has worked feverishly to dismantle his legacy.

Outside of Russia, China, and Hungary, this isn’t true at all for the rest of the developed world.

Nations across the rest of Europe, South America, and Asia imitated FDR’s and LBJ’s America, most going beyond our simple development of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the legalization of unions to further expand opportunity and social mobility for their citizens.

For example, Taiwan has the most efficient and comprehensive single-payer healthcare system in the world; Germany requires half of the members of every large corporation’s board of directors to come from the ranks of organized labor; Luxembourg has the highest national minimum wage in the world at roughly $19.50 an hour (they calculate it monthly).

All of Europe is pledged to reduce greenhouse gasses to get climate change under control, and they require chemical companies to prove their new compounds are safe before introducing them into food or the environment (the “precautionary principle”).

Prisons across the rest of the developed world are committed to rehabilitation and only in America are run for profit; every other developed country carefully regulates the possession of guns; pharmaceuticals are inexpensive — at least half, and sometimes a tenth of their cost here in the US — in every other developed country in the world.

Republicans and the billionaires who fund them reject all of that.

They want to abandon modern ideas like prohibitions on child labor and the age of consent; worker and workplace protections and unions; free, quality public schools and colleges; civil rights and the power of women to make their own healthcare decisions.

They’re dedicated to taking America back to the era before the New Deal and, as Steve Bannon said, “deconstructing the administrative state.”

Over the years, the GOP has used a series of plans to reach their goal of a billionaire- and-corporate-owned-and-run America with working people turned into serfs and children in factories instead of school.

In 1971, it was the Powell Memo, written by Virginia tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell and delivered to the US Chamber of Commerce. It called for a rightwing takeover of America’s schools and colleges; building out a corporate-friendly media infrastructure; packing the courts with pro-corporate, anti-labor conservatives; and the wholesale purchase of Republican politicians at both the state and federal level.

The following year Richard Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court and over the next quarter-century he used that position to put many of his own suggestions into law. In addition to decisions gutting the powers of unions and deregulating industry, Powell’s major achievement was authoring the 1978 Boston v Bellotti decision that struck down hundreds of state and federal anti-corruption laws, explicitly allowing corporations and their senior officers to bribe politicians for the first time in American history.

No other developed country in the world tolerates this; outside of the United States, you only find it in developing countries that have been taken over by corrupt autocrats.

Two years later, when Ronald Reagan cut a traitorous deal with the Ayatollah to hold the American hostages in Iran long enough to destroy Jimmy Carter’s chances in the 1980 election, the Heritage Foundation stepped up with a plan to further gut the rights and powers of working-class people and elevate corporate and billionaire power.

They called it the Mandate for Leadership and, at the time, The Washington Post said it was “an action plan for turning the government toward the right as fast as possible.”

Reagan adopted over half of Heritage’s suggestions and in some cases went even farther, cutting enforcement of our anti-trust laws; ending the Fairness Doctrine; slashing the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich from 74 percent down to 27 percent; declaring all-out war on unions; gutting the EPA, Education, and Labor Departments; and selling off federal lands for pennies on the dollar to mining and drilling operations.

Now the partly-billionaire-funded Heritage Foundation has laid out a second-stage plan for the next Republican administration, whether it’s Trump or somebody else, whether it’s next year or in future presidential election cycles.

They call it Project 2025. With it, they intend to finally and fully seize control of and transform America. With it, they will rule.

Ideologues on the right correctly see the Trump administration as having been a bumbling mess. Nobody expected him to win the election, not even Trump himself (he and Roger Stone had already registered the URLs and put together a “Stop the Steal” campaign claiming “election fraud” to distract and kneecap incoming President Hillary Clinton).

Nobody realized how effective Putin’s interventions — his 29 million Facebook ads and message posts targeting a million or so people in six swing states who’d been identified as persuadable by the GOP and passed along to Russian Intelligence via Paul Manafort — would be.

When Trump was declared the winner he didn’t even have a victory speech ready, was totally unprepared to govern, and it took the better part of three years for Trump and his corrupt clown car to get their act together. Most of the time he and his son-in-law were too busy making money out of their connection to the White House. They’ve corruptly taken home billions in the years since 2016.

So this time the rightwing billionaires and their GOP lackeys aren’t taking any chances.

First up, they want to deconstruct the Civil Service, taking much of the federal workforce back to 1882. There’s an amazing backstory here.

Way back in 1881, a man named Charles Guiteau thought he’d properly bribed President James Garfield by giving the president, during an in-person visit in the White House, a speech he’d written for Garfield to use. Garfield was polite but didn’t offer Guiteau a federal job, which provoked a murderous rage: shortly thereafter, Guiteau met Garfield’s train and shot him twice, killing him.

The explicit and institutionalized practice of exchanging gifts and personal loyalty for federal jobs dates back to the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829-1837), arguably the second-most depraved president in American history behind Trump (which is probably why Trump hung his picture in the Oval Office). His favorite nickname for himself — given him by the Cherokee he slaughtered with the Trail of Tears — was “The Indian Killer.”

Jackson had elevated the practice of bribing the president to get federal jobs into an art-form: it was called the “spoils” or patronage system and was insanely corrupt. It was also, by 1883, routine.

After Guiteau failed to gain his “spoil” or “patronage” from Garfield and killed him, President Chester Arthur oversaw the writing and passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883. It separated all those government jobs from the administration in power, turning federal workers from patrons of the president into permanent bureaucrats whose first loyalty was to the nation instead of the guy who happened to be in the White House at any particular time.

It also outlawed bribing the president for a job. The goal, which it accomplished and has held for 140 years, was to end corruption in the bureaucratic branches of the federal government.

Donald Trump wanted to functionally end the Civil Service and replace the top levels of the nation’s 2.7 million federal workers with people loyal exclusively to himself. He did this through an October 21, 2020 executive order, Schedule F, (which Biden reversed on his first day in office) that reclassified those workers out of their Civil Service jobs and into political appointee positions doing the exact same work.

The next Republican administration will almost certainly put Schedule F back into force, reestablishing the 1829 spoils system for the federal government. As Paul Dans, director of Project 2025’s “Presidential Transition Project” and a former Trump administration official, told the Associated Press:

“We need to flood the zone with conservatives.”

Next up, Project 2025 proposes to kill off federal efforts that may inhibit the profits of the fossil fuel industry and the billionaires it’s created who are helping fund both the GOP and Heritage.

As Scott Waldman wrote for Politico:

“Called Project 2025, it would block the expansion of the electrical grid for wind and solar energy; slash funding for the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice office; shutter the Energy Department’s renewable energy offices; prevent states from adopting California’s car pollution standards; and delegate more regulation of polluting industries to Republican state officials.

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“If enacted, it could decimate the federal government’s climate work, stymie the transition to clean energy, and shift agencies toward nurturing the fossil fuel industry rather than regulating it. It’s designed to be implemented on the first day of a Republican presidency.”

After ensuring fossil fuel industry profits and the further wilding of our weather, Project 2025 would effectively dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, presumably on behalf of the petrochemical and other polluting industries that are also big GOP donors.

It would either end or downsize the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assistance, and the Office of Public Engagement and Environmental Education. Like the process Trump began, it would shatter the EPA into pieces, moving regional offices and cutting its workforce by “terminating the newest hires in low-value programs.”

It would also block states from advancing any agenda that may prevent the further expansion of carbon pollutants that are driving global warming by “ensur[ing] that other states can adopt California’s standards only for traditional/criteria pollutants, not greenhouse gasses.”

One of the most disturbing aspects of Project 2025 and other plans for future Republican presidencies is their consolidation of power in the hands of the president, reflecting the way government is run in Hungary, China, and Russia rather than the checks-and-balances envisioned by our nation’s Founders.

They would outright end the operational independence of the of the Department of Justice and the FBI, turning both into tools (or weapons) the president alone could wield.

The Federal Reserve, with its ability to turn on the monetary spigot to ensure “the good times roll” or turn off the spigot to induce a recession would also become the president’s political plaything.

Ditto for the Federal Communications Commission, which has the power to not only regulate but even shut down over-the-air radio and TV broadcasts that displease it, as well as wielding a largely today-unused power of censorship over cable TV and the internet.

And the Federal Trade Commission, which has the power to grant billion-dollar favors or inflict severe punishments on companies, would lose their independence because they could be used to reward or destroy companies that have earned the favor or ire of the president.

As Russell Vought, president of one of the 65 far-right organizations on the Project 2025 advisory board, told The New York Times:

“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them.”

This is all a reflection of what, for several decades, has been called the Unitary Executive Theory. It argues — erroneously — that a strongman president like Putin, Xi, or Orbán is what the Founders and Framers had in mind.

As professors Karl Manheim and Allan Ides of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles famously wrote in 2006:

“In fact, the theory of the unitary executiveis anything but an innocuous or unremarkable description of the presidency. In its stronger versions, it embraces and promotes a notion of consolidated presidential power that essentially isolates the Executive Branch from any type of congressional or judicial oversight.

“And it is much more than an academic theory. Rather it is an operative way of thinking about and applying Executive Branch power that has had and will continue to have real-world consequences for our republic and for the international community. In attempting to understand and appreciate the significance of unitary executive theory, it is worthwhile to keep in mind that it is a product of the late 20th century and not a legacy bequeathed from the founding generation.

“The theory, which in fact is more about power that it is about law, grew out of a somewhat perverse reaction to abuses of presidential power that had come to light during the late sixties and early seventies. Such events as President Johnson’s fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident and President Nixon’s secret war in Cambodia, among many other similar abuses of presidential power, led to efforts to curb what was perceived as an increasingly imperious Executive Branch. …

“The almost immediate response to this reform movement was a redoubling of efforts to consolidate and amplify presidential power. The theory of the unitary executive grew out of this reactionary response.”

Project 2025 and other efforts by the GOP to consolidate power in the Executive branch, as well as their recent successes at packing the courts and buying off Republican members of Congress, should be a clanging five-alarm fire bell for our republic.

This neofascist ideology of “rule by the rich” has been explicitly embraced by both Trump and DeSantis (who, this June, sent a senior advisor, David Dewhirst, to work on Project 2025), and the themes and contents of the plan are also regularly invoked on the campaign trail by Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley.

The merger of billionaire wealth with partisan Republican governance — and their combined efforts to reshape our government in their own corrupt image, the public be damned — threaten the integrity and future of the American experiment.

But it can only come about if we fail to awaken people, mobilize them, and vote.

Step one, then, is to wake people up to what the GOP and its billionaire patrons are planning. Pass it along.

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https://www.alternet.org/donald-trump-civil-service-test/

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https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/rep-matt-gaetz-r-fl-and-former-trump-official-russ-vought-discuss-using-new-house

REP. MATT GAETZ (GUEST HOST): Let's start with the Holman Rule. Talk about what it means for any member of Congress to be able to get up and defund a particular bureaucrat.

RUSS VOUGHT (PRESIDENT, CENTER FOR RENEWING AMERICA; FORMER OMB DIRECTOR): It's huge. And so you know I come from the executive agency before this role, and we would have all of these career bureaucrats that we would be having to work with and the American people would largely not know their names, until Covid happened and now everyone knows who Tony Fauci is. But think about the ability to go to the House floor and have a debate about a particular bureaucrat. That is enormous. It changes the entire game right now.

I would have situations where our staff would do anything they possibly could not to necessarily give me what I needed, because they were worried about their own ability to stay anonymous. The Holman Rule makes sure that those career bureaucrats are no longer anonymous, and that they are put in the crosshairs to the same extent – in the arena – that you are. That I am. 

So that is a game changer in having the appropriations debate. Also, not just what the message it sends, but the extent to which it itself focuses the appropriations process on the deep state, on theadministrative state that exists, that is now woke, and it's weaponized.And that has to be the biggest fiscal priority that we have, to go after the woke and weaponized bureaucracy.

GAETZ: Russ, if we'd have had this tool, we would have obviously directed it at Anthony Fauci, right? So, if you're comparing and contrasting, we would have had the ability – if we had the rules that we now have in place – if we'd have had those in place in the last Congress, you could actually force a vote on funding Fauci or not funding Fauci. As we look at a weaponized system across the apparatus of government, give us some examples or advice for who are some of the bureaucrats that enjoy their anonymity now? What are some of the agencies we should look at to target and take this tool out of the toolkit and actually put it to use?

VOUGHT: Well, there's all sorts of the types of people that you'd want to get in with Labor, HHS, and the COVID fascism that we've saw as a result of kind of lockdown-era policies. But we're going to want to use this in the Department of Justice. We're going to want to find those people that participated in the Russia hoax, that participated in going to FISA and lying to get warrants that are cooked up against the American people. So as you bring that aspect of what you negotiate, along with the Church-style committee that will sit within Judiciary, those are the kinds of things that you can say in real time that makes this enforcing.

The battle is certainly not over. We've got to show up at every stage, but it is self-enforcing.You enforce it, the 20 enforce it.And that was what makes this different than anything else that we've seen in recent memory, because not only is your voting no confidence in real speak – your motion to vacate present, but you also have the Rules Committee that is enforcing this on a bill-by-bill basis. So it's enormously successful and you've got a lot of potential to use it against thatbureaucrat that you'd identify that's standing in your way at NASA or the EPA – who's the EPA bureaucrat that put Joe Robertson, a 77-year-old Navy veteran in jail for building four ponds on his ranch to be able to fight wildfires. That's the person we want to use the Holman rule on.

===

==

wtf?!  lied to IG

https://montanafreepress.org/2022/11/10/zinke-wins-race-for-montanas-western-u-s-house-district/

no lnx gfx

2022 ELECTIONS

Zinke wins race for Montana’s western U.S. House district

The Republican beat Democrat Monica Tranel by four points to conclude the state’s highest-profile race of the 2022 election cycle.

by Arren Kimbel-Sannit

11.10.2022

Ryan Zinke, Republican candidate for Montana's western U.S. House district, attends a police ride-along in Browning on Oct. 14 Credit: Arren Kimbel-Sannit / Montana Free Press

Republican Ryan Zinke has won the race to represent Montana’s newly created western U.S. House district.

With all precincts reported, Zinke received 120,285 votes. Energy attorney Monica Tranel, a Missoula Democrat, received 112,271 votes, four points behind Zinke. John Lamb, a Norris farmer running on the Libertarian ticket, came in third with9,304 votes. Zinke declared victory Wednesday night, and the Associated Press called the race for him Thursday morning.

“I’m incredibly grateful to the people of Western Montana for once again placing their trust in me to fight for them in Washington, D.C.,” Zinke said in a statement Wednesday night. “The voters saw through the vicious lies and deceit of my opponents and radical political groups. Truth matters, and now it’s time to fight for freedom and protect our way of life in Montana.”

Montana's Western Congressional District (MT-01)

Based on the 2022 general election results available at 8:41 a.m. 11/10/22.

RYAN K ZINKE leading by 8,014 votes of 241,861 counted (+3%).

Votes in county-level victory margin

[map]

Ryan Zinke (R)

Monica Tranel (D)

Libertarian John Lamb was also on the ballot.

In a tearful Thursday morning speech in front of the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library in Missoula, Tranel, bundled in a heavy coat as snow fell, conceded, thanking her supporters and pledging to continue fighting for the state.

“I shall do so not in the 118th U.S. Congress, but I will serve the people of Montana as I have done my entire career, as your advocate, as your neighbor, as a forever champion of the Montana that I know, I love and I believe in still,” Tranel said.

Zinke will soon be the first person to represent the western U.S. House district. The state had two districts until the 1990 U.S. census, when it was relegated to a single at-large district. Montana regained its second congressional district following the 2020 census count.

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11.23.2022

The western district, as drawn by the state Districting and Apportionment Commission, includes 16 counties and two Native American reservations. Republican former President Donald Trump would have carried the district by 7 points in 2020. Tranel outperformed Democratic President Joe Biden in the district, but ultimately could not drive enough votes her way to upset Zinke, who has been considered the favorite since declaring his candidacy in the primary.

RELATED

The Zinke, Tranel (and Lamb) show

Ryan Zinke and Monica Tranel are the two main contenders for Montana’s new western U.S. House district. The presence of Libertarian John Lamb and Zinke’s long, variable record in government could make things complicated.

by Arren Kimbel-Sannit

10.26.2022]

It was arguably the state’s highest profile race this year, as Montana Democrats looked to improve on a dismal showing in 2020 and send one of their own to Congress for the first time since longtime representative Pat Williams retired in 1997.

Zinke raised more than $6 million, more than double the $2.8 million Tranel brought in.Lamb did not file campaign finance paperwork, saying he did not raise or spend enough to cross federal reporting thresholds.

“The voters saw through the vicious lies and deceit of my opponents and radicalpolitical groups. Truth matters, and now it’s time tofight for freedom and protect our way of life in Montana.”

U.S. REP. RYAN ZINKE

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Zinke, a former Navy SEAL from Whitefish, began his political career as a state legislator in 2009. He was elected to Montana’s at-large House district in 2014, and then again in 2016. Shortly after being elected to his second term, Zinke joined the cabinet of President Donald Trump as Interior Secretary, a tumultuous period that generated 18 federal investigations into Zinke’s ethics and decision making before his resignation in 2018. Trump endorsed Zinke’s run this cycle.

The former congressman’s time in the Trump administration has colored much of his campaign, both in terms of policy and his contempt for the “deep state” that he says stood in his way during his tenure as Interior Secretary.

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He has trumpeted his record as a booster of domestic energy protection — which he achieved in part by expanding oil and gas leasing on public lands — and has said the first piece of legislation he will introduce is the so-called FEAR Act, a proposal to make it easier to fire federal employees.If Republicans take the U.S. House — which, despite a few outstanding races, seems likely — Zinke has said the party needs to use its appropriations power to hamstring the Biden administration and cut federal spending. 

“We’re just gonna take the money away so they can’t buy a piece of paper, let alone hiring the Department of Environmental Justice in the EPA,” he said at an October campaign event in Ravalli County.

Tranel, a former Olympic rower, entered electoral politics with a Republican run for the Public Service Commission in 2004, but has since switched parties, running as a Democrat for the commission in 2020 and then for Congress this year. Citing her legal work serving the office of Montana Consumer Counsel, challenging NorthWestern Energy before the PSC and representing renewable energy projects, Tranel has presented herself as an anti-corporatist litigator and a foil to Zinke, who took consulting work in the oil and gas sector after leaving federal office.

Monica Tranel

Democrat Monica Tranel conceded the race for Montana’s western U.S. House district to Ryan Zinke on Thursday, Nov. 10, in Missoula. Credit: Screenshot for Tranel Instagram feed]

Much of her campaign focused on attacking Zinke’s record at Interior, which included a recent finding by a Trump-appointed inspector general that he misled investigators about a Whitefish land deal connected to a Halliburton executive, and his general coziness with the fossil fuel industry against the backdrop of climate change.

Even in admitting defeat, Tranel still had her sights set on her opponent.

“The fact of the election does not erase the corruption of Ryan Zinke,” she said Thursday.

Lamb, the Libertarian, unsuccessfully ran for state Senate in 2020. He first found a public platform as a supporter of the Bundy family during the series of federal trials arising from the 2016 Malheur standoff. A father of 12 raised in an Amish-Mennonite community in Indiana, Lamb made reducing the role of the federal government in just about every aspect of American life a core tenet of his campaign.

Even with his connections to the far-right Bundys and his avowedly hard-line anti-abortion views, he found a welcoming campaign companion in Tranel, generating concern among Republicans that he could play a spoiler to Zinke by peeling off Republican votes. The two attended numerous candidate forums together, and the Montana Democratic Party lauded Lamb’s campaign, writing in an October release that Lamb was “connecting with voters across the district, sharing his story as a father of 12 and a small business owner.”

Outside PACs presumably interested in boosting Tranel’s chances also presented Lamb as a more principled conservative alternative to Zinke, who began his career in the Legislature as a relative moderate.

Zinke will return to Congress alongside fellow Republican Matt Rosendale, who handily won his race in the state’s eastern district. Zinke will now travel to Washington for new member orientation and to receive committee assignments, his team said.

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Christian nationalist Russ Vought recently appeared on Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk’s radio show to discuss plans to purge at least 10% of federal career staffers under a new Trump administration. Vought described that portion of the federal workforce as “the roots of the problem” that prevented former President Donald Trump from fully implementing his agenda. During the interview, Kirk suggested that the next Republican administration subject civil servants to “ideological purity tests.”

Vought ran the powerful Office of Management and Budget under Trump and now heads up a right-wing think tank called the Center for Renewing America, whose mission is to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God.” While at OMB, Vought helped develop a policy called “Schedule F” as a tool that would allow a new conservative administration to circumvent job protections typically enjoyed by federal workers who aren’t politically appointed.

Speaking on the September 23 edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, Vought claimed to have reclassified 90% of the workers in his own office under that job category

CitationFrom the September 23, 2022 edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble

“Schedule F is an authority that we discovered and developed at the end of the Trump administration to give the president the ability to reclassify career civil servants, who normally have permanency within the bureaucracy, to turn them into essentially at-will employees,” Vought told Kirk.

When asked by Kirk how many career employees he’d like to potentially sack using this authority, Vought set the floor at 10% of current workers, but suggested that he considers as much as 80% of the federal workforce to be ideological opponents.

“I would say that within my agency, we had, you know, 80% of it was left-leaning,” Vought said. “Their paradigms were all rooted in this permanent class, ruling class that defines the milieu of Washington, D.C.”

“And you can reason and work with that crowd, but there is about a 10% of activists that are animated by the wokeism, the anti-racist movement, to be able to come into these agencies and they're just activists,” Vought added.

Vought then told Kirk that someone in the human resources department at OMB described themselves and their colleagues as “committed anti-racists.”

Kirk responded by calling that person the leader of “a sleeper cell of a woke communist ideology who's just right there within our federal government.”

“You're going to have to figure out how to solve that, I don’t know,” Kirk continued. “But ideological purity tests are an interesting approach, but let's break up the federal government first and then we'll go from there.”

In July, Axios reported on discussions Trump allies were having about staffing their next administration, with the Schedule F being central to the framework. Vought reportedly has been a leader in these efforts: As Media Matters reported a week prior to Axios’ story, Vought stated publicly that he wants to build an “army” of hard-right activists with “Biblical worldview” to run the federal agencies that he can’t outright destroy. He’s been very clear that the goal is to get “ideologically committed individuals up and down the agencies,” and he’s been similarly clear that Schedule F is the way to do it.

Right-wing propagandist Christopher Rufo – known for launching bad-faith attacks on critical race theory and targeting children’s hospitals that provide care to trans youth – has pushed for a similar course of action.

“The idea is to centralize ideological control over the federal agencies in the White House and create a team at the Office of Management and Budget to enforce it,” Rufo said in an interview with conservative website IM-1776 in July.

In furtherance of those shared goals, Vought has attempted to turn the Center for Renewing America into a shadow government-in-waiting for Trump or another conservative president. In June, Vought brought on Jeffrey Clark, a former Department of Justice environmental lawyer and Trump’s top coup architect, as senior fellow at CRA. Kash Patel, another key figure in Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election, is a CRA senior fellow as well.

In the recent interview with Kirk, Vought expressed a common regret among former Trump officials that the administration wasted precious time in its first years adjusting to the steep learning curve of running the government.

“My hope is that we don’t have to do that again because we're laying the groundwork now,” Vought said, later adding, “We want to make sure that can never happen again and make sure that from day one, we can ensure that the agenda is being done.”

===

https://www.supersummary.com/the-fifth-risk/summary/

Fifth Risk is a 2018 non-fiction book by Michael Lewis that examines the transition and political appointments of the Donald Trump presidency, especially with respect to three government agencies: the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Commerce.[1][2][3][4][5] The book spent fourteen weeks on The New York Times non-fiction best-seller list.[6] A lengthy excerpt from the book was published twice by The Guardian,[7] using a quote from a top adviser to Trump in the title.

Barack and Michelle Obama acquired the rights to the book for a Netflix series about the U.S. government.[8] The 2022 American comedy series The G Word with Adam Conover is "loosely inspired" by the book.[9]^

See also

A history lecturer is expressing concern about the Republican Party's agenda and how it could lay the foundation for a far more radicalized second term for former President Donald Trump.

In a new op-ed published by The Guardian, Andrew Gawthorpe, a history and international studies lecturer at Leiden University in the Netherlands, cited an Axios report as he detailed the political party's "core plan" as the 2022 midterm elections approach.

"At the core of the new plan, as reported by Axios, is theintention to strip away employment protections from thousands of senior civil servants, eliminating at a stroke a large chunk of the civil service’s expertise and institutional memory," Gawthorpe wrote. "This would allow them to be replaced with a ' cadre' loyal to Trump’s America First agenda,most of them likely to be 20- and 30-somethings with no experience in government who would owe their newfound prominence to Trump alone. Ideologically zealous and loyal to a fault, they would set about trying to reshape the government in Trump’s image."

READ MORE: How Donald Trump's 'secret' plan to steal the presidency has its roots in the messy 2000 election

He went on to note the distinct change in Trump's proposed agenda as he compared this situation to his first presidential term.

"What seems to have changed in the interim is Trump’s desire for revenge. According to the Axios report, Trump’s top priority in a new administration will be to “clean house” in the intelligence community, DoJ and FBI. Loyalists will be installed in the place of current leadership. Why these places? The standard conservative critique of the civil service is that everyone in it is a liberal, but that certainly isn’t true of these agencies. Rather, they’re the places you need to corrupt if you’re bent on breaking the law and persecuting your opponents. Trump – notoriously thin-skinned, impulsive, and vengeful – wants to do just that."

Gawthorpe also highlighted the bigger issue with the radicalized agenda.

"But this isn’t just a problem limited to Trump. The conservative movement as a whole increasingly dreams of turning the state against its enemies. The people at the heart of the movement today are more likely to idolize the Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán than they are Ronald Reagan," he said.

READ MORE: Is Donald Trump illegally flashing the presidential seal at his golf outings?

"They aren’t animated by the belief that the job of government is simply to get out of the way – instead, they want to use it to impose a radical agenda on American society," Gawthorpe wrote. "And the recent overturning of Roe v Wade provides a blueprint for how a compliant conservative judiciary can enable government officials to take away even the most fundamental of human rights."

He concluded with his perspective of what a future Republican presidency could look like given the current political climate of the party.

"Although Trump would bring his own particular set of grievances to the venture, any future Republican president is likely to follow a similar blueprint," he wrote. "Given the sheer scale of changes they want to impose on America, today’s conservatives act more like revolutionaries. And like all revolutionaries, they want to seize control of the state and launch an offensive on as many fronts as possible. If Trump’s first term isn’t to appear to future historians as a grim prelude to something far worse, they must never be allowed to do it."

READ MORE:'Hot-blooded, contentious, deranged': J6 hearing to reveal details about 'craziest meeting in Trump presidency'

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