By james art Vought’s comments are reminiscent of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 program, in which he is involved. He emphasized the need for the president and his close allies to take full control of the executive branch. “The president must craft and enforce a plan for the executive branch,” Vought wrote in the project’s manifesto. “Unfortunately, however, a president today takes office to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that too often carries out its own political agendas and preferences — or, worse, the political agendas and preferences of a radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country.”
Among Vought’s hopes for a second term, according to ProPublica, is a war on federal civil servants, whom he wants to purge in favor of ideologically sympathetic appointees. “We want bureaucrats to be traumatized,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they’re increasingly seen as villains.” We want their funding stopped so the EPA can’t enforce all the rules against our energy industry because they don’t have the financial bandwidth to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”
Instead, those who are not “traumatically affected” can be immediately fired. In 2020, Trump issued a last-minute executive order that would have made it theoretically possible to fire thousands of federal government employees by reassigning them to a category known as Schedule F, bypassing the protections for government employees in federal law that would otherwise protect them. The executive order was never implemented before Trump left office, and President Joe Biden rescinded it shortly after taking the oath of office, but Trump loyalists are salivating over the prospect of reviving it if Trump wins in November.