Scholars explain why Trump’s plan for mass govt. firings is 'so scary'

15 August 2024

Former President Donald Trump and his presidential running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), have made a concerted effort to distance themselves from Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's controversial 900-plus-page blueprint for a second Trump Administration. Yet many of Trump's critics, including Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, have been pointing out that Project 2025 was put together by Trump's major allies, including Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts.

Moreover, Vance wrote the forward for Roberts' forthcoming book, "Dawn's Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America," which won't be released until after the election.

One of Project 2025's many controversial proposals is a plan to replace the federal workforce with pre-screened Trump loyalists — an idea Trump promoted with his Schedule F. In October 2020, Trump issued Schedule F as an executive order, but it was rescinded after Joe Biden was sworn in as president on January 20, 2021.

In an article published by Salon on August 15, journalist Marina Villeneuve explains why some political scholars find the Project 2025/Schedule F proposals for the federal workforce so "scary."

E.J. Fagan, a political science professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, told Salon, "They want to fire lots of people…. working in expert roles in places like the Environmental Protection Agency, across the Justice Department, etc. And that's kind of scary, right? Especially you think about those places like the Defense Department, Justice Department. You do a lot of bad things if you remove everybody who's willing to say no to you."

The word "scary" was also used by Sidney Shapiro, a law professor at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

Shapiro warned that filling federal government agencies with unquestioning loyalists is a recipe for disaster.

The law professor told Salon, "If loyalty really is the watchword, then competence isn't — and that's a really scary prospect for everything the government does right now, whether it's delivering the mail or Social Security…. Politicians come, politicians go. But when we've had the right combination, and the country wants to make big improvements and do important things, it's really these folks that have driven all that. And I think it's really scary that the most experienced of them, the ones who really, day-to-day, make this work, could get replaced."

Read Salon's full article at this link.

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