MAGA operative compiling list of "anti-Trump" federal workers, setting stage for Project 2025 purge

Longtime GOP operative Tom Jones is investigating dozens of federal employees suspected of opposing Donald Trump's policies as part of a larger, coordinated project by MAGA-aligned groups to reshape the government into a tool for right-wing causes.

According to an Associated Press report, Jones and his American Accountability Foundation (AAF) are using a $100,000 grant from the right-wing Heritage Foundation to ferret through the backgrounds, social media activity and past political statements of high-ranking government workers, starting with the Department of Homeland Security. Once the operatives have collected a list of problematic employees, they plan to publish 100 names online to demonstrate who might stand in the way of a second-term Trump agenda, and expose them to scrutiny, harassment, reassignments, and firings.

“We need to understand who these people are and what they do,” Jones, a former Republican Senate aide, told the AP.

In order to compile their list for the so-called Project Sovereignty 2025, AAF is collecting tips from a network of contacts that includes federal workers. The extensive probe into civil servants — who aren't political appointees and have to swear an oath to the Constitution, not to any specific president — has alarmed experts who have characterized the AAF effort as undermining democracy and evoking the McCarthyist red scare; the 1950s inquisition that targeted suspected Communist sympathizers was led by Roy Cohn, who became a confidant of a younger Trump.

In announcing its funding of the group, the Heritage Foundation lauded AAF for seeing to purge "anti-American bad actors" in government. Jacqueline Simon, policy director at the American Federation of Government Employees, described that language as “shocking.”

“It just seems as though their goal is to try to menace federal employees and sow fear,” Simon, whose union supports President Joe Biden, told the AP.

AAF's investigation would lay the groundwork for Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, which proposes reviving a Trump-era policy that tried to reclassify tens of thousands of federal workers as political appointees, exposing them to mass firings and opening up their positions to a cadre of right-wing replacements.