Portside

James Goodwin, the policy director at the Center for Progressive Reform, explains what the “bleak” world of labor under Project 2025 would look like.

Even as Donald Trump seeks to disavow Project 2025, he and the rightwing effort’s authors have voiced similarly hostile plans for the US’s 2 million-plus federal employees – to replace many of them with political appointees.

Donald Trump has pledged to revive an executive order known as Schedule F that would give him the power, if re-elected president, to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of government civil servants, a step toward autocracy.

In separate actions over a few days, House and Senate Republicans moved to undercut worker due process rights, weaken labor organizations and protect companies with workplace violations affecting contractor employees.

"I don't think that the model that Scott Walker has put forward is a model for success," said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. "That's the model that the Koch Brothers have tried to spread everywhere." Charles and his brother David Koch operate one of the most powerful conservative groups in the nation and have supported efforts across the country to curtail union rights.

Not only are Trump's cabinet appointments redolent with some of the worst elements in corporate America, but several have backgrounds that suggest they would move to decimate more than a century of legal protections for federal civil service employees, starting with instituting what would be in effect loyalty tests to gauge worker attitudes in light of proposed slavish pro-business accommodations by agency heads of the incoming administration.

Hiring freezes, an end to automatic raises, a green light to fire poor performers, a ban on union business on the government’s dime and less generous pensions — these are the contours of the blueprint emerging under Republican control of Washington in January. these are the contours of the blueprint emerging under Republican control of Washington in January.