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american federation of government employees
'Truly Horrifying': Trump Allies Already Making List of Federal Employees to Target
"This is an intimidation tactic to try to menace federal workers and sow fear," said the American Federation of Government Employees.
Jun 24, 2024
A right-wing organization allied with presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump and funded by the group behind Project 2025 has reportedly begun assembling a list of federal employees deemed potentially disloyal to the former president, an effort that is drawing comparisons to the McCarthyite crusades of the 1950s.
The American Accountability Foundation (AAF), headed by former Republican Senate staffer Tom Jones, is "digging into the backgrounds, social media posts, and commentary of key high-ranking government employees, starting with the Department of Homeland Security," The Associated Pressreported Monday.
The group, according to AP, is "relying in part on tips from his network of conservative contacts, including workers." AAF, which received a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation—the right-wing group spearheading Project 2025—intends to publish its list online once it's completed.
In its
announcement of the $100,000 "innovation prize," the Heritage Foundation said the award would support AAF researchers as they work to "alert Congress, a conservative administration, and the American people to the presence of anti-American bad actors burrowed into the administrative state and ensure appropriate action is taken." Heritage proudly noted that AAF contributed to the smear campaign that derailed Gigi Sohn, President Joe Biden's erstwhile nominee to serve on the Federal Communications Commission.
This is a truly horrifying story about MAGA hunting federal workers. ⤵️ One complaint: the piece falls for the ruse that Heritage is doing this separate from trump but the two are joined at the hip on project 2025. News coverage should clearly say that. https://t.co/4XqkLxd6QX pic.twitter.com/H5dOHpIm3g
— Jennifer Schulze (@NewsJennifer) June 24, 2024
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the nation's largest federal workers union, condemned AAF's initiative as "an intimidation tactic to try to menace federal workers and sow fear."
"Civil servants are required take an oath to the Constitution—not a loyalty test to a president," the union wrote on social media.
During his final weeks in office, Trump signed an executive order establishing an entirely new category of federal employees known as "Schedule F." Before Biden rescinded the order shortly after taking office in 2021, tens of thousands of federal workers were to be reassigned to the new category, under which they would lose employment protections typically afforded to career civil servants—making them far easier to fire.
Trump has made clear that, if he beats Biden in November, he intends to revive the Schedule F order as part of a broader effort to bend the federal government to his will and target his political enemies.
"We will pass critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States," Trump said during a rally in South Carolina in March 2022, before he formally launched his 2024 campaign. "The deep state must and will be brought to heel."
Axios has reported that Trump's "top allies are preparing to radically reshape the federal government if he is reelected, purging potentially thousands of civil servants and filling career posts with loyalists to him and his 'America First' ideology."
"The public list-making conjures for some the era of Joseph McCarthy, the senator who conducted grueling hearings into suspected communist sympathizers during the Cold War," AP reported. "The hearings were orchestrated by a top staffer, Roy Cohn, who became a confidant of a younger Trump."
AP noted that while AAF "won't necessarily be recommending whether to fire or reassign the federal workers it lists," the group's work "aligns with Heritage's far-reaching Project 2025 blueprint for a conservative administration." The blueprint states that Trump's Schedule F order "must be reinstituted."
Skye Perryman, CEO of the watchdog group Democracy Forward, told the outlet that AAF's plans recall some of "the darker parts of American history."
Echoing AFGE, Perryman said Trump's allies are trying to "chill the work of these civil servants" as part of a "retribution agenda."
"They're seeking to undermine our democracy," she added.
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'Catastrophic': EPA Workers Union Slams Trump Pledge to Gut Climate Agencies
"Donald Trump has made it clear that a second Trump term would look worse than his first—with broader attacks on science and the environment driving the day."
Jun 05, 2024
A union representing thousands of Environmental Protection Agency workers raised alarm Tuesday over former President Donald Trump's pledge to slash key federal climate departments if he's reelected in November and condemned his attempt to downplay concerns about the planetary emergency, which is fueling destructive extreme weather and
pushing global temperatures to record highs.
"Donald Trump has made it clear that a second Trump term would look worse than his first—with broader attacks on science and the environment driving the day," Marie Owens Powell, president of American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Council 238, said in a statement.
"His first four years were a fiasco for the agency bargaining unit workers whose mission it is to protect human health and the environment during this climate emergency, with cuts to the workforce, rollbacks of regulations, and more," Powell added. "Trump has made it clear that a second term would be catastrophic for the environment and reverse the progress made against climate change."
The union's statement came in response to a Sunday Fox Newsinterview in which Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, said that federal environmental agencies have been "so bad for us," claiming they've "stopped you from doing business in this country."
"We're going to do, like, Department of Interior," Trump said, naming one of the agencies he plans to target. "There's so many things you can do."
The former president, whose administration dismantled more than 100 federal environmental rules during its four years in power, also mocked President Joe Biden's description of the climate crisis as an existential threat and ridiculed fears about rising sea levels.
Trump falsely claimed that rising sea levels mean "you have a little more beachfront property," ignoring catastrophic flooding and other disastrous impacts of ever-rising seas. The U.S. experienced a record number of billion-dollar extreme weather events last year, including destructive flooding.
Trump says he supports climate change and rising sea levels because it “means basically you have a little more beachfront property” pic.twitter.com/qLh0Y1yu6Q
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) June 2, 2024
Powell said Tuesday that Trump's "all-out assault on science and our employees" during his first four years in the White House "led us to issue an EPA Workers' Bill of Rights, which had over 10,000 signatures, many of which were agency employees, and was endorsed by nearly fifty members of Congress and partners in the science community."
"And the prospect of a second Trump term is why we fought so hard to win a first-of-its-kind Scientific Integrity Article in our new contract that will help protect our work from political interference," Powell continued. "Our contract win means workers can stand up for scientific integrity without fear of retaliation, and sends any disputes related to scientific integrity to an independent arbitrator instead of a political appointee."
"The climate emergency we are facing hurts everyone, regardless of political party," the union leader added, "and the EPA and its employees protect everyone's health and the environment, regardless of their political agenda."
Trump and his right-wing allies have repeatedly expressed their intention to aggressively target federal environmental agencies and rules if the former president wins the November election against Biden.
During an April fundraiser attended by major fossil fuel executives, Trump—who was convicted last week on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records—pledged to swiftly roll back climate regulations if the industry most responsible for the climate emergency forks over $1 billion to support his presidential bid.
"He will sacrifice our planet for the profits of fossil fuel executives. We cannot let that happen."
Politicoreported last month that oil and gas industry lobbyists and lawyers are already in the process of "drawing up ready-to-sign executive orders for Donald Trump aimed at pushing natural gas exports, cutting drilling costs, and increasing offshore oil leases in case he wins a second term."
Meanwhile, the right-wing Project 2025 initiative spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation is pushing "a sweeping battle plan to dismantle federal agencies and public health standards, including vital environmental protections," freelance climate journalist Dana Drugmand wrote last week.
A recent study by Carbon Brief estimated that a second Trump term would unleash an extra 4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent into the atmosphere, imperiling global efforts to rein in planet-warming emissions.
"He will sacrifice our planet for the profits of fossil fuel executives," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) warned Tuesday. "We cannot let that happen."
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Federal Workers Union Urges Biden to Reject GOP Austerity, Invoke 14th Amendment Over Debt Limit
"I urge you not to yield to threats but instead to heed the advice of many legal scholars who have concluded that you have the inherent power, and indeed the duty, to avoid a default," wrote AFGE's leader.
May 23, 2023
A union leader representing over 750,000 government employees on Tuesday pressured U.S. President Joe Biden to reject congressional Republicans' demands for spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling and to avert an economically devastating default by invoking the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
As Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has continued to warn that the federal government could run out of money to pay its bills as early as June 1, some legal scholars and progressive lawmakers have encouraged Biden to combat the GOP's economic hostage-taking by invoking the section of the amendment which states that "the validity of the public debt... shall not be questioned."
The American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO (AFGE) joined those calls on Tuesday, with national president Everett Kelley writing to Biden to call for "unilateral action to ensure that the government continues to pay its bills and fulfill its obligations after the Treasury exhausts all extraordinary debt measures within the next several days."
"Our union members are the doctors, nurses, firefighters, border patrol agents, corrections officers, federal police, food safety inspectors, transportation security officers, and other public servants who keep the government running around the clock," Kelley noted. "They served tirelessly throughout the pandemic, defending the public, often at great personal risk. More than a few gave their lives to their country. It would be unconscionable now to agree to a budget deal that once again sacrifices their well-being on the altar of fiscal austerity."
"We urge you not to agree to spending caps because, inevitably, they undermine the ability of federal agencies to carry out their missions."
"We urge you not to agree to spending caps because, inevitably, they undermine the ability of federal agencies to carry out their missions and result in further unwarranted cuts to federal jobs and compensation," the union leader stressed, taking aim at a key demand of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and fellow Republicans, who passed their so-called Limit, Save, Grow Act late last month.
Noting that "many federal agencies that deliver services directly to the public, like the Social Security Administration, are already at the breaking point from years of inadequate funding," Kelley warned that they "can in no way withstand further budget cuts of the magnitude proposed by House Republicans in the morally bankrupt 'Limit, Save, Grow Act.' This bill, even in the most diluted form, would be an economic and humanitarian calamity."
"Clearly a default must be avoided at all costs," he added. "I urge you not to yield to threats but instead to heed the advice of many legal scholars who have concluded that you have the inherent power, and indeed the duty, to avoid a default under the Constitution's 14th Amendment. You have additional authorities to mint platinum coins under 31 USC § 5112. Please use these authorities now before it is too late."
Before returning to Washington, D.C. to continue negotiations with McCarthy, Biden told reporters on Sunday that "I think we have the authority" to invoke the 14th Amendment but given the potential for a legal challenge," the question of whether it could be done in time to prevent a default "is unresolved."
\u201cQ: "It sounds like the White House is now ruling out invoking the 14th Amendment as an option to get around the debt ceiling. Is that accurate?" \n\n@PressSec: "It is not going to fix the current problem that we have right now..."\u201d— CSPAN (@CSPAN) 1684871442
Politico reported Friday that some Biden aides worry that "even the appearance of more seriously considering the 14th Amendment could blow up talks that are already quite delicate," and actually doing so could "trigger a pitched legal battle, undermine global faith in U.S. creditworthiness, and damage the economy."
Kelley's letter came as a federal judge scheduled a debt limit lawsuit hearing for May 31, the day before the so-called X-date. That case—filed by another union, the National Association of Government Employees, against Biden and Yellen—cites the 14th Amendment and aims to have the debt limit statute deemed unconstitutional.
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