A fledgling conservative group is training up an army of right-leaning staffers to aid the next Republican president and ultimately put a stake through the heart of the so-called "deep state."
American Moment, which was founded in 2021 with seed money from now-Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), is recruiting trainees from diverse background who have an explicitly reactionary worldview with the long-term goal of developing future congressional staffers and political appointees, reported Politico.
“The loaf has to go in the oven and bake for 10 years so that the class of credentialed experts — the people who know the system and know where the levers of power are — are your people,” said Saurabh Sharma, the group's 25-year-old president and co-founder. “The way you make senior staff is by making junior staff 10 years earlier.”
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Sharma and his 26-year-old co-founder Nick Solheim have prioritized candidates who are “immediately employable,” such as a recent hire who's 18 and just finished high school and a 29-year-old who left a job in finance to work on Capitol Hill, and they pay $3,000 a month, with 401(k) matching, to attract candidates from less affluent backgrounds.
“What we’re trying to do is credential people who would otherwise not be able to get here,” said Solheim, who dropped out of college himself due to financial difficulties. “People who didn’t go to elite universities, people who don’t have rich parents.”
The pair believe many GOP lawmakers are underserved by unqualified staffers, who they described as “23-year-old s--theads” whose parents “sent them to D.C. to keep them as far away from the family business as possible,” and they're preparing a legion of conservative staffers to fight political culture wars from inside the government.
“They’re pushing the conservative movement away from a set of economic policies that I think have been bad for working-class people,” said Vance, who's still a close ally despite leaving the group's advisory board earlier this year. “They’re thinking seriously about how to staff Hill offices and the next administration with people who share the views of our electorate, as opposed to [people who] hate the electorate and what they represent.”
Sharma hopes the next GOP president restores some version of Donald Trump's executive order removing job protections from 50,000 "Schedule F" employees, which he hopes can be partially filled by some of the fellows his organization is training to take on bureaucratic jobs.
“If implemented, it will be a great piece of any reformist conservative agenda, but it is not the be-all-end-all of anything,” Sharma said. “It is one chapter in a very long book of things that need to be done.”