The 'Wokeness' Purge Has Already Begun
President-elect Donald Trump has not even taken office yet, but Republicans have reportedly already started the effort to purge wokeness from the federal government.
Several conservative groups are currently in a campaign to identify federal employees who are partisan or possibly resistant to enacting Trump’s agenda, according to a CNN report. These groups include the Heritage Foundation Oversight Project and the American Accountability Foundation.
The organizations have flooded federal agencies with tens of thousands of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests demanding access to emails, personnel records, and other communications between government employees. The effort is part of a comprehensive strategy to lay the groundwork for mass firings of civil servants under Trump’s Schedule F executive order issued in 2020, which was later revoked under President Joe Biden.
The measure would reclassify certain federal positions that are involved in policy-making, policy determining, or policy-advocating roles in a way that would exempt them from typical civil service protections. This would make it easier for the president to fire these individuals.
Mike Howell, executive director of the Heritage Foundation Oversight Project, told CNN that his organization “has submitted around 65,000 requests to federal agencies under the Freedom of Information Act.”
The report continued:
The Department of Transportation, for example, has received about 1,600 FOIA requests through the first nine months of 2024, and about 1,075 came from three people all tied to the Heritage Foundation Oversight Project, according to a CNN review of the agency’s FOIA logs.
Howell has sent requests to these agencies to unearth “conspiracies to subvert the president-elect’s expected purging by asking for emails that include ‘Trump’ and ‘reduction in force.’”
The American Accountability Foundation recently published the names of 60 individuals in the Homeland Security Department (DHS) who they believe might try to hamper the president-elect’s agenda, CNN reported:
The list includes senior-level employees who donated to Democratic candidates or causes, previously worked for groups that advocate for more liberal immigration policies or posted on social media about their efforts to assist immigrants who arrived in the US seeking legal status.
The initiative also targets diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and those involved in promoting them in the federal government.
Predictably, this effort has frightened members of the bureaucracy in several federal agencies, who characterized it as “the potential weaponization of internal agency emails.” Some have even taken action to conceal their political leanings:
The efforts have alarmed agency officials and unions representing federal workers. One source for a union representing Environmental Protection Agency workers characterized the effort as the potential weaponization of internal agency emails. In response, the source said that EPA employees are “putting as little as possible in any written form.”
The union for EPA employees has submitted its own requests for information to get names of EPA employees who may be at risk, but it has not received a response because the agency’s FOIA office has been inundated with requests from Trump allies.
This initiative suggests that conservatives are learning their lesson from Trump’s first term in office, which dealt with bureaucrats and officials working to impede his agenda. The move will likely cause quite a stir on the airwaves and interwebs, especially if and when the mass firings begin after Trump takes office.
But perhaps it is a necessary move. One of the biggest problems with the size and scope of government is that it has allowed unelected bureaucrats to essentially rule through the force of law despite the desires of the president and his team, an issue Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch highlighted in his book, “Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law." He wrote:
Increasingly, too, these rules are produced without effective presidential oversight. As Judge Neomi Rao, who once headed the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, has explained, “a single bureaucrat can at times exercise an authority that exceeds that of a member of Congress. . . . Meaningful burdens can be imposed by regulations that do not reach the threshold for [this Office’s] review or even consideration by an agency head or other political official.”
The administrative state has basically become another branch of government, wielding a level of power the Framers of the U.S. Constitution never intended. While doing away with the administrative state is a lofty and possibly insurmountable objective, perhaps this initiative might serve as a decent start.
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