Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC) confronted Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, on Saturday about Project 2025—a plan that includes laying off up to 50,000 federal government workers.
In August 2023, the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, in collaboration with other right-leaning groups, published “Project 2025.” According to its official website, the project aims to “pave the way for an effective conservative administration” using “a 180-day policy agenda, personnel, training, and playbook,” if the GOP wins the 2024 election.
Proposals include reintroducing legislation to make it easier to fire federal workers; prosecutors for distributing abortion pills by mail; and eliminating the recently established diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiative within the Department of Defense (DOD). However, one of the most prominent proposals is a plan to reintroduce Schedule F, a Trump-era executive order rescinded by President Joe Biden that would see tens of thousands of federal workers reclassified, making it easier to fire them.
While the Trump campaign has previously said outside groups do not speak for the former president, the 1,000-page Project 2025 proposal was drafted with input from a long list of former Trump administration officials poised to fill the top ranks of a potential new administration. , according to the Associated Press.
Newsweek has reached out to the Trump campaign via email for comment.
During his MSNBC The weekendSteele, who co-hosted the program, discussed a specific proposal to replace federal workers, asking Roberts, a Republican, about who would replace them.
“Talk to us about what it looks like if Heritage called for the removal of 50,000 federal employees. Who did you replace and where did they come from? I suspect many of the people you used in the federal service. It’s been a long time and not only a Republican administration, but also a Democratic administration, Steele said.
Roberts cited political contributions when he claimed federal workers donated to the Democratic Party.
“They have and 95 percent of political contributors give to the Democratic Party,” Roberts said.
However, Steele interjected and asked, “So you’re going to fire someone because they wrote a check to the Democratic candidate?”
Roberts continued by doubling down on his efforts to replace civil servants, calling them “unelected bureaucrats.”
“No, we are going to fire people and the number should be more than 50,000, because there are more than 2 million federal employees because in the last century, the radical left has seen the administrative state as the fourth branch of government. “They are unelected bureaucrats … but in the end we need to send power from the imperial city of Washington back to the people,” Roberts said.
Steele asked Roberts again if he would fire someone who “wrote a check to a Democratic candidate. If he’s doing his job, why does it matter?”
According to Roberts, it’s important because “they’re doing a job on a mission that doesn’t fit.”
Thomas Gift, a political scientist who heads the Center for US Politics at University College London, previously said Newsweek that this policy kills three birds with one stone for the Republic.
Gift said the proposal would “make it easier to undo the alleged liberal ‘deep state’ that has been a boogeyman for the party since Trump; cutting the bloat in an administrative bureaucracy that many think is too wasteful for taxpayers; and ending ‘mission creep. ‘ in departments and agencies federal agencies that often operate with minimal accountability or oversight.
During this year’s election cycle, current polls have shown that the results will be tight as Trump and President Joe Biden are statistically tied in most surveys or have only a marginal lead.
The 2025 project has been a consistent talking point in the middle of the 2024 election because the House Democrats have warned about it, recently launching a task force to start fighting the proposal and end it as a reality if Trump is re-elected.
Representative Jared Huffman, Democrat of California, launched The Stop Project 2025 Task Force earlier this month as it is made up of about half a dozen Democratic lawmakers. The group aims to begin informing lawmakers about Project 2025 by holding a forum on Capitol Hill and informing voters about the idea.
Newsweek Huffman’s office has been reached by email for comment
According to the AP, Roberts called the effort “not serious,” adding that the left is “in a frenzy.”
“Project 2025 is not going to ‘stop,'” Roberts said in a statement to the AP, adding that Democrats against Project 2025 “preferred to try. We will not give up and we will win.”
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for a common field.