I know we all get tired of the endless klaxons about what Trump is doing or is going to do. It's exhausting. It's meant to be. it's meant to wear you down and overwhelm with constant fear, stress, and anger.
That said, this is another thing to be aware of and in ways *more* dangerous than Project 2025 because they are trying to be quiet and change how things work.
New York Times reporter Ken Bensinger says the America First Policy Institute, which has nearly 300 executive orders ready to be signed, wou
So a huge focus of this was the idea that a incoming Republican administration would from the outset be at odds with the 2.3 million people who work in the federal government as career employees, and that their job would be to kind of override the collective will of all these employees and impose the agenda of the administration on the entire sort of federal bureaucracy. The overriding message was that these are the - essentially the enemies located inside the federal government, and this is what you would - theoretically, as an appointee or other employee of a new administration - would have to do to confront these people and overcome any resistance they have to the agenda that you'd be seeking.
The kind of things this group wants would break the government. which is what they want. I know that sounds like hyperbole, but this is the group that honestly loves the old "government small enough to drown in the bathtub"
DAVIES: The America First Policy Institute has a policy book called the "America First Agenda." One of the things, as I understand it, that it calls for is the elimination of civil service protection for government employees. Now, this goes back decades. It's designed to ensure that people who are experts in their field in the government are not subject to political whims, that they can't be punished for not engaging in political work and that they must do their work fairly and, you know, objectively. What exactly does the "America First Agenda" say about this? How does it accomplish it? What is it intended to do?
BENSINGER: Well, the federal government is a gigantic employer, right? I mean, it sort of has two divisions, I guess, we could think of. We have the civil service and we have the military service, and they're, I think, roughly equivalent in size. It's a total of just over 4 million people who take paychecks from the federal government. And, you know, we think of the three branches of government - we think of the executive, and we think of the legislative, and we think of judicial - by far the largest would be the executive, which encompasses not just the White House, which is what we think about, but an enormous number of agencies that touch almost all of our lives pretty much every day, right?
DAVIES: What exactly does the "America First Agenda" say about this?
BENSINGER: So the America First Policy Institute - perhaps its most aggressive idea for a policy in a new Republican administration is this concept of turning federal career employees into at-will hires. What that means is that they would lose a lot of the protections, if not all the protections that they have, that they enjoy, that are supposed to shield them from political influence, that are supposed to protect them and allow them to do their job in a way that is not political, that is supposed to be neutral and unbiased. Currently, most federal employees, of which there are several million, are unionized, and it's quite an elaborate process to discipline and dismiss them. And if the institute had its way, if it gets this through, all of these would instantly be the same as an employee, for example, at a Walmart or at a private institution, where they don't have a contract. They don't have a union to protect them, and they can be dismissed basically for any reason.
In fact, the policy book by America First Policy Institute calls for a summary dismissal, quote, "without appeal" - without the chance to appeal for it. They would simply have to give someone notice in writing that they were no longer wanted in the administration. And as long as it's for nondiscriminatory reasons - that is to say they couldn't fire them for their race or their religion or their ethnicity or their gender - as long as it doesn't fall underneath that umbrella, they could fire them for any reason. It doesn't have to be something sort of defensible in court. They could say, well, you believe, for example, in climate change. You said so, and we as an administration do not share that view, therefore we don't want you here anymore. You're gone. Or someone could have a concept about what clean air is supposed to be and how many particles of one contaminant or another should be in the air. And if that doesn't jibe with what possible Trump administration would want, then the America First Policy Institute would say that those people should be summarily fired.
If you don't get why this is bad, think about all of the things Trump has said or done and then understand that the only reason some of those horrendous ideas never happened is because good government employees followed the rules of government. Maybe they even agreed with the policy in principle but they took their job and their responsibilities seriously.
This would be a huge opening for corruption.
And they know it.
When you sign these documents, you're agreeing to comply with certain things. And so one of them, for example, is you have to agree to disclose how much money you raise for the transition project and who is giving you the money. And you have to agree to a limit of no more than $5,000 of donations per donor. Transition fundraising is just kind of a funny little place in the world of fund raising. It is not - unlike campaign contributions or presidential inauguration fundraising, it is not regulated by the Federal Elections Commission. In fact, the only place that regulates it is the General Services Administration, which puts these limits on it if you sign the document.
But in a way that no one anticipated, the Trump transition is refusing to sign the document that would require it to comply with that. And what that means and what people close to the transition have told me is that they feel they can raise as much money as they want from individuals and that they never have to share who gave them money. And I should add that, really, I misspoke when I said individuals because it could also be from organization, institutions, private companies and, in fact, foreign entities. It is truly a dark pool of money that if the incoming Trump administration doesn't sign it, no one will ever - basically ever know how much money came in and who it came from. So that's one piece.
The other piece is the ethics code. In order to get access to government agencies and to get national security clearance and all that sort of thing, incoming transition teams are required to create an ethics code that they write and that they sign and they show to the current White House to make sure it conforms with federal law about what the ethics code should say. And that's supposed to prevent conflicts of interest. It's supposed to make sure that when people are getting access to these federal agencies, they don't trade off the information they're being shown; they don't use that for personal gain; they don't, you know, share that with lobbyists or use that for lobbying purposes of their own. You can sort of imagine what it would be like if someone opens all the secret books of every federal agency and all the secret information and protected information they contain, how people who are not scrupulous could trade off that information.
Well, Trump transition has actually developed its own ethics code, but it has not been accepted or not been submitted in a way that is acceptable to the current administration and has not been posted as law online, as law requires. Ethics experts I've talked to have said that, in part, that might be because it doesn't comply with the law. The ethics code proposed by Trump's transition simply falls short of what is required in terms of ethical safeguards and that it is very inadequate in terms of protecting against conflicts of interest.
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And some people think that the - what the strategy might be from the Trump transition is to do nothing until after the election. If they lose, well, perhaps it's moot. And if they win their leverage over the Biden administration, which would be outgoing at that point, would be huge because, essentially, you can imagine, a giant game of chicken, where the incoming Trump administration would say, look, if you care about national security and you care about a smooth transition so that the country is safe, you're going to find a way to play ball with us, and dare them to refuse to accept whatever terms that the incoming Trump administration desires. Essentially, we're going to give you a watered-down ethics code, and you can take it or leave it.
