The Conservative group’s ‘watchlist’ focuses on layoffs of federal employees

An organization funded by the conservative Heritage Foundation has compiled an online “watch list” of federal employees claims cannot be trusted to secure the U.S. border and should be fired, a sign that supporters of Donald Trump’s immigration policies are preparing to help him neutralize the administrative state they believe tried to thwart his first presidency.

The “DHS Bureaucrat Watch List” – a website unveiled in the final weeks of a presidential campaign in which immigration is a key issue – names 51 federal policy experts and senior leaders, the majority of whom are career officials at the State Department. Homeland Security and other agencies. The group identified them largely using public comments on social media, previous work experience and campaign finance data.

Among the employee actions cited by the group are posts celebrating the legalization of same-sex marriage or praising the contributions and successes of undocumented immigrants, as well as donations as low as $10 to Democratic candidates. One employee union compared the effort to expose the private views of officials to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s 1950s campaign to purge federal employees he accused of being communists.

The site’s founder, a former Republican congressional staffer named Tom Jones, told The Washington Post that he and his staff are trying to add more names to the list and have sent emails to more than 500 federal employees asking for their help in identifying colleagues who they believe that they are not committed to keeping undocumented immigrants out of the country.

Jones said his goal was to expose people he believed had “long-standing and deep biases” on immigration policy. In addition to monitoring social media posts and political donations, Jones said he looks for clues of past advocacy on immigration issues, as well as other clues about employee positions, such as gender pronoun sharing and support for diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

“There are a large number of people in government who have dedicated their life’s work to helping immigrants settle in the United States,” Jones said. He said it was “Pollyannaish” to expect those people to turn around and enforce Trump’s plan to deport tens of millions of people and close the borders, as he has promised.

“These people aren’t going to do it. They’re actually going to undermine it,” Jones said. He said he would endorse similar efforts to target employees of other agencies, including the Department of Defense, the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Jones said he has had no coordination with Trump’s campaign or transition teams, but hopes any new administration will take note of his work and use it to identify workers to lay off.

The list has already attracted the attention of Trump allies in Congress, with four Republican House members writing a letter to the head of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services demanding that the worker accused of praising immigrants without papers be fired.

While many top-level government officials have political ties and are appointed by presidents, the bulk of the federal workforce consists of approximately 2.2 million career employees who work at agencies in Washington and across the country, implementing policy and dealing with the daily activities. -daily operations of the country, regardless of the party in charge.

In 2020, Trump issued an executive order aimed at removing protections for tens of thousands of state workers by reclassifying them under a new employment category called “Schedule F.” The order did not go into effect until Biden took office and rescinded it. Trump has pledged to reissue the order on the first day of his second term if he is re-elected, and has vowed to “fire rogue bureaucrats and career politicians.”

Spokespeople for the Trump campaign and the Trump transition did not respond to requests for comment.

Reached by The Post, several of the targeted employees said they did not want to speak out of fear for their jobs and the safety of their families. Others spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid drawing additional attention to themselves or violating agency policy. They said they feared that being on a public list would make them vulnerable to threats and that if Trump won, they would be called on to declare their loyalty to Trump and his party.

“This is clearly intended to intimidate career government officials who are public servants and are trying to fulfill the department’s mission and do it across all governments and do it with integrity,” said one official on the list.

Another said he worries about the watchlist’s effect on young people in government, especially LGBTQ+ workers, “who have to ask themselves, ‘How safe is it for me to be my own person here?'”

The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents about 86,000 members in Homeland Security, drew the parallel with McCarthy, who claimed that hundreds of State Department employees were treasonous communists and then used his position in Congress to investigate.

“It is intended to intimidate and frighten public servants as they become involved in serving their country,” said union spokesman Andrew Huddleston.

Department of Homeland Security officials said the agency had contacted the targeted employees to provide security support. “We are extremely proud of the more than 260,000 DHS officials who work every day to ensure the safety and security of all Americans. We condemn in the strongest terms any attempt to harass or intimidate our public servants,” DHS Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas said in a statement.

Some of the employees mentioned work at the Department of Justice or the Office of Management and Budget. A DOJ employee group focused on gender equality wrote to agency leadership on Thursday, citing the watch list and warning that the effects of such activities “on employee mental health, professional and personal reputation, finances and physical safety could be devastating.”

A DOJ spokesperson said the agency takes worker safety seriously and encourages employees to report perceived threats to management. OMB did not respond to a request for comment.

Jones denied that the watch list poses safety risks to said employees. “It is a website that tells about people who work for the government. That is a non-controversial area of ​​research,” Jones said in an interview with The Post.

Jones previously worked for the conservative Republican Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Jim DeMint of South Carolina. He also has done opposition research for candidates including Sen. Ted Cruz, R.-Texas, during his unsuccessful run for the White House in 2016.

Jones is now the president of the nonprofit American Accountability Foundation, which was founded shortly after the 2020 election and has tried to derail the confirmation of Biden appointees to political posts and judges. The group sought to find and publish information about nominees on a website similar to the new watch list, with photos of targets and details of their past activities and policy positions. Some of the nominees the group targeted ultimately withdrew their nominations; others, including Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, were confirmed.

The American Accountability Foundation announced earlier this year that it would focus its attention on government employees. It developed the DHS employee list with the help of $100,000 from the Heritage Foundation, a longtime center of conservative power in Washington.

Heritage’s Project 2025 policy guide for a second Trump administration — which Trump has disavowed but was written by many of his former advisers — describes “large swathes” of federal employees as left-wing ideologues who undermined Trump’s policy goals during his first term.

In a May press release announcing the grant to Jones’ group, Heritage President Kevin Roberts, who led Project 2025, praised the group for “their fight to hold our government accountable and rid it of bad actors.” ”

Heritage remains proud to “support critical oversight of government officials who undermine American sovereignty and national interests,” spokesman Noah Weinrich said Friday.

Jones told The Post that he and a staff of five others created the list after emailing agency employees looking for the names of colleagues who could undermine immigration policy. In an email sent to a Homeland Security official and obtained by The Post, Jones explained that he was looking for the names of senior officials “who are leading the charge within the civil service against open borders. ”

“If you are concerned that there are leaders in the civil service who are not committed to securing the borders and preventing illegal aliens from being in the United States, I hope you will contact me with their names and details of their work that enables illegal aliens. immigration,” Jones wrote.

DHS officials warned staff last week that clicking on the list’s website could lead to malware attacks on their computers, according to emails viewed by The Post; Jones responded with a letter claiming the site is safe and warning the agency that his organization could consider legal action.

DHS officials did not respond to questions from The Post about the dispute.

Peter Jamison contributed to this report.