Armed with rhetoric about the “deep state”, a conservative-backed group is planning to publicly name and shame career government employees that they consider hostile to Donald Trump.
This “blacklist” of civil servants, which will be published online, is intended to advance Trump’s broader goals, which, if elected, include weeding out government employees and replacing them with loyalists.
The group behind the list is the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), which was founded in 2020 and describes its mission as “working non-stop to expose the left’s secrets and hold Biden accountable”. A 2022 New Yorker profile described AAF as a “conservative dark-money group” and “slime machine”.
In recent years, AAF has focused its efforts on derailing Biden’s political appointments. Now, according to a press release, the AAF is getting to work on a new mission: “Project Sovereignty 2025”.
Backed with a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation, an influential rightwing thinktank, AAF will compile information, including social media posts, about civil servants they suspect will “obstruct and sabotage a future conservative president”. They plan to publish dossiers on those non-public facing individuals, starting with the Department of Homeland Security, and expose them to scrutiny.
“WE ARE DECLARING WAR ON THE DEEP STATE,” AAF wrote in a post on Twitter/X earlier this week.
News of the project has reportedly sent alarm bells ringing among the civil service community, and it’s the latest sign that Trump and his allies are seeking to wrest control of Washington DC, which they believe has been overrun by their opponents.
The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union (and which has endorsed Joe Biden), described Project Sovereignty 2025 as “an intimidation tactic to try to menace federal workers and sow fear”.
“Civil servants are required to take an oath to the Constitution,” they wrote on X. “Not a loyalty test to a president.”
Project Sovereignty 2025 has also drawn comparisons to the anti-communist blacklisting techniques employed during the McCarthy era.
Donald Moynihan, a political scientist and the McCourt chair of Georgetown University’s McCourt school of public policy says those comparisons are valid, and that AAF’s plans reveal a “deep animus towards state actors who are seen as disloyal to the party and party ideology, and a desire to punish those actors”.
During the first Trump administration, Trump and his allies made no secret of their animosity towards non-political government workers who they believed were working internally to impede his policies, particularly on immigration. Those suspicions have been increasingly rolled into nebulous conspiracies about the “deep state” – a cabal of government officials with a sinister agenda.
“Trump used to talk about ‘The Swamp’, and that rhetoric has become sharper and more negative since it’s merged with discussion about ‘the deep state’,” said Moynihan. “This is also because he views the state as a threat to him personally.”
Moynihan says it’s also important to consider Project Sovereignty 2025 in the context of broader patterns of intimidation against individuals across institutions, and across all levels of government.
“Librarians, teachers, professors, public health officials, election officials, who were previously anonymous, and left to do their jobs, now have to worry about being doxxed, being accused of being disloyal and being part of the deep state,” said Moynihan. “I think that is really quite new.”
“Project Sovereignty” would lay the groundwork for Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025”, a 900-page blueprint for Trump to follow if he’s elected. Project 2025, which explicitly makes “Christian nationalism” a priority for Trump, also seeks to reorganize the federal government. Critics have labeled it “authoritarian” in nature.
One of Project 2025’s top priorities is the implementation of “Schedule F”, which would reclassify tens of thousands of career civil servants as political appointees. This move would allow Trump to conduct mass dismissals and replace those employees with his supporters.
Trump introduced Schedule F via executive order in October 2020, which was later rescinded by Biden. Earlier this year, the Biden administration ushered in additional protections to “safeguard federal employees from political firings”. Trump has vowed to reimplement Schedule F on his first day in office, “I will shatter the Deep State,” he said in a statement last year.
On the surface, it would be easy to perhaps dismiss AAF as some fringe outfit steeped in “deep state” conspiracies. But that’s not the case. AAF is run by Tom Jones, former legislative director to Republican Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson. Jones also ran opposition research for Senator Ted Cruz’s unsuccessful bid for president in 2016.
“This isn’t just some crank in his basement,” said Moynihan. “This is someone funded by the Heritage Foundation, who has worked with Republican senators, and is part of the broader Republican mainstream operation.”
Jones and AAF have not responded to the Guardian’s request for comment.
Some of AAF’s tactics in recent years offer some insight into what Project Sovereignty 2025 could look like. For example, they haven’t just targeted Biden’s high-profile nominees for cabinet and court seats. They’ve also gone after lesser-known political appointees, whose relative obscurity leaves them particularly vulnerable to smears, which are then published to the website bidennoms.com along with their photos.
The AAF also has a track record of disproportionately targeting women and people of color. According to the New Yorker in 2022, more than a third of the 29 candidates they’d singled out were people of color, and nearly 60% were women.
“Those sorts of lists create more intimidation,” said Moynihan, “More fear, and more consequences when these actors have access to power to potentially fire people, in addition to intimidating them.”
