Experts are already worried about the immediate impacts on the country as former President Donald Trump gears up to wipe out much of the federal government workforce, reported The New York Times on Monday.
The Heritage Foundation's infamous Project 2025 plan calls for broadly reclassifying much of the civil service who perform basic, nonpartisan government functions to allow the president to fire career employees at will and replace them with people loyal to him. Trump, while he distanced himself from much of Project 2025 as it became unpopular with voters, has made clear his plans to do something similar.
Meanwhile, wrote Jyotti Thottam for the Times, the Trump team "has not participated in transition planning, security clearances or ethics reviews with the departing administration, even as it prepares to name about 4,000 people as political appointees to run various agencies and departments in the federal government. It’s very possible that new Trump officials will simply move in with their desk décor on Inauguration Day and not worry about it."
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This means the entire process of bringing in the new government could be derailed by something like a cyberattack, she wrote — to say nothing of what will happen in the first few months as new employees try to set up their new policies.
Max Stier, who runs the Partnership for Public Service, told Thottam that “This would be the worst form of malpractice,” and likened it to "a train wreck you can see coming." He is particularly worried about the impact of a potential expertise purge at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which is vital to inform the executive branch what its policies will cost or whether they are even legal. This branch of the government already saw chaos when Trump was on his way out the door in 2020.
With Congress unlikely to do much to intervene, Thottam wrote, the executive branch is likely to see a "protracted period of legal challenges from individuals and government employee unions while many of the best people in government simply leave for the private sector" — gutting the civil service of people who know how to do their jobs.
