What is Schedule F, and why is Project 2025 so focused on reinstating it?
Originally posted Jun. 7, 2024. For post-election updates, see below.
In this 17-minute video, Fred Wellman explains Project 2025's emphasis on Schedule F, how it will be used by the next Republican administration, and the danger to America's basic government functions, including the military. Wellman is a former head of The Lincoln Project.
I highly recommend listening to the entire video. But his closing summary is, by itself, very concerning.
Among the U.S. bureaucracy's 2 million employees, there are 8,200 senior executive service members, he says. These are "our most senior people who've been there for decades, guiding our government. And then there are 4,000 political appointees. [Heritage Foundation] wants 54,000 essentially political appointments. They're going to convert almost the entire top echelons of the United States government to political appointees of the current party, which they assume will be the Republicans.
"Chew on that number. It's a giant number, and look, I'm not going to say the government system is perfect. It's not."
But there right-wing lies about what the bureaucracy is, and how it operates.
According to one of them, civil servants are "all unionized so it's impossible to fire them," Wellman says. "That's not true at all. only 33 percent of federal employees are union. People say, well, that's because of the military, [but] no, we're talking about the 2 million federal employees. Only 33% are in unions. They're not allowed to strike. Mostly [the unions are] for collective bargaining and for protections, but the Civil Service itself protects them from easy firing."
That's not to say Civil Service employees cannot be fired at all. "They are firing over 10,000 federal employees ... every year. It's not impossible to fire people. You've just got to do it right."
These employees include "huge numbers of experts. The United States Department of Defense has 950,000 civilian employees. People are shocked by that number, because then you have another million-plus active service members.
The military's civilian personnel are vital because service members are regularly reassigned to new posts. Wellman, a veteran, explains that "the continuity within military organizations is provided by professional civilians. I remember being at a headquarters [where] we had military officers like myself doing the training and the planning and the deployments. It was the civilians that saved us because they've been there a long time [and] they could say, 'Hey, you know we we did this back in '91 [during] Desert Storm. Let me let me help you write these plans. I know exactly what file folder these plans are in....'"
"The Civil Service at the DOD is hugely important [and] full of dedicated Americans. Seventy-five percent of them DOD are veterans themselves, so when [the Heritage Foundation] comes in and says they want to fire all these people, they're talking about veterans, [including] disabled veterans. They're talking about your friends and neighbors.
"They're talking about 17 intelligence agencies who rely on deep expertise. Why would we fire all the Russia experts or the Iran experts? Because that's what you're talking about doing when you talk about huge firings like that ... they want to politicize the government in their own image.
"This is not some 'oh, we're going to clean up the bureaucracy [to] make it more efficient thing."
"Look, There are things that can be done," he says. "There are laws that need to be passed. There are things we can do to tweak the system. But the idea of a wholesale appointment of 54,000 or more hardcore Maga who've actually had their social media [searched] to make sure they never said a negative thing about Donald Trump — and then infusing them in the highest echelons of our government is devastating. It will change the way our government is run.
"Why do I know this whole thing is Insidious and horrible? Believe what they're telling us. Seb Gorka [says] root out the Deep State and jail them. That's what they're talking about.
"Folks, those are your friends and neighbors, the people who make sure you get your Social Security check on time, the people who evaluate your disability for your veterans benefits, the people who help homeless people get off the the streets, and veterans get their surgeries.
"That's the people they want to throw in jail.
"Listen to them. Believe them when they tell us what they're doing."
Fred Wellman's podcast is the best, most accessible information I've found yet on the potential impact of Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 on our government's ability to function. Please take time to listen to it from the beginning.
NOTE: I'm not able to verify Seb Gorka's comment about jailing civil servants, but it's in keeping with his political history.
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For more information about Schedule F, see the Wikipedia article.
Executive Order on Creating Schedule F In The Excepted Service, a page from 45's White House archives, issued Oct. 21, 2020. (This is Schedule F, as conceived by Trump and enacted 13 days before the 2020 election. )
In this YouTube short, Brian Tyler Cohen focuses on Schedule F's impact on free and fair elections. He closes with this warning: "[Project 2025] wouldn't be the first step toward autocracy. It would be autocracy.*"
Trump’s Schedule F plan, explained, a page of the Protect Democracy website. ("Schedule F is an effort to redirect regulatory, administrative, and investigatory functions of the government away from the public interest and toward the president’s interests. This makes it easier for an aspiring authoritarian American president to abuse his power to punish, intimidate, and silence opponents by making government aid, contracts, licenses, merger approvals, tax benefits, permits, civil penalties, relief aid, grants, and regulatory waivers contingent on showing personal fidelity.")
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Post-election updates
'Canary in the coal mine': Writer says Dems face first battle for federal government, by Matthew Chapman, Raw Story, Jan. 1, 2025. ("'Resisting the DOGE commission must be the next step in Democrats showing they’re a workers’ party, like they say they are.'")
Update on most DANGEROUS element of Project 2025, uploaded Nov. 29, 2024 to the Brian Tyler Cohen channel on YouTube. (Cohen interviews attorney Max Stier about the good and bad news regarding Schedule F.)