Molly White's Citation Needed - Trump's Project 2025 ghostwriters

Episode Date: January 28, 2025

Exposed PDF metadata from the Office of Personnel Management reveals that Heritage Foundation-linked Trump devotees are writing policies at federal agencies. Originally published on January 27, 2025.

I'm Molly White, and you're listening to the audio feed for the Citation Needed Newsletter. You can see the text version of the newsletter online at citation needed.news. Trump's Project 2025 Ghostwriters. Exposed PDF metadata from the Office of Personnel Management reveals that Heritage Foundation linked Trump devotees are writing policies at federal agencies. This issue was originally published on January 27, 2025. The people who are now in charge of the Office of Personnel Management haven't been scrubbing the metadata on their PDFs and have exposed the original authors of the guidance they're publishing. Two have links to the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025.

Noah Peters is the author of the OPM acting director Charles Azel's January 27 memo, providing guidance on the, quote, restoring accountability to policy influencing positions within the. the federal workforce executive order, which is being described as the Schedule F order because it effectively reinstates that policy under a new name, which is Schedule Policy slash Career. Peters also authored the January 20 memo from Azelle, which exploits loopholes to bypass limits on political appointments. Both of these memos are clear steps towards achieving a primary goal of Project 2025, to expand President Trump's power and to replace career civil servants with Trump loyalists. As far back as 2023, the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 was recommending Peters for a position in Trump's second administration.

Peters had previously been appointed in 2019 as the solicitor at the Federal Labor Relations Authority, where he, quote, aided and defended Trump appointees anti-union FLRA policies that went against decades of the agency's own precedents, according to court accountability action and and state democracy defender's action. Peter's return to private practice in 2022, but recently quietly updated his LinkedIn profile to reflect a new title of Senior Advisor to the Office of Personnel Management. This appointment does not appear to have been announced anywhere else. James Shirk was the true author of the Joint Office of Management and Budget and OPM memo on return to office implementation plans. The guidance in that memo echoes a November 20, 2024 op-ed

in the Wall Street Journal by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramoswamy, outlining their Doge plan, where they wrote, quote, requiring federal employees to come back to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome. The memo has earned criticism from the American Federation of Government employees, the largest federal employee, Union, which has expressed that the directive would, quote, undermine the government's effectiveness by limiting its ability to attract talented employees and maintain continuity of operations in emergencies. Schirke also authored the joint OMB and OPM memo providing guidance on the federal civilian hiring

freeze, another effort towards the goal of slashing the size of the federal workforce. James Shirk was announced as assistant to the president for domestic policy on January 18. A White House official during Trump's first term, Shirk was a key figure in Trump's Schedule F endeavors to purge civil servants and replace them with loyalists. After Biden was elected and he repealed Schedule F, Shirk slunk off to the America First Policy Institute to continue efforts to advance Trump's policies. Prior to these positions, he was a staff member at the Heritage Foundation. An anonymous, unverified post on the Fed News subreddit by someone claiming to work at the OPM

suggests that the policy ghostwriting is only one of the many problems suddenly facing the agency in recent weeks. They wrote, quote, I am a current employee at the Office of Personnel Management. This is a throwaway account for obvious reasons. I'm posting this because people need to know what's going to be. on at OPM. I've been an OPM employee for nearly a decade and a federal employee for almost 20 years. I've never witnessed anything even remotely close to what's happening right now. In short, there's a hostile takeover of the Federal Civil Service. Let me say this in no uncertain terms. OPM has been compromised and taken over. The very backbone of American government, the HR of all

HR in the U.S. government, has been taken over by outside politicals. In just five days, they managed to push aside dozens of non-political career civil servants who were there specifically to prevent the civil service from becoming the president's henchman. The current acting director, Charles Chuck Azell, is a low-level branch chief. He's the friendliest yes man you'll ever meet. He never says no. It's clear they pushed aside all the high-level non-political civil servants who refused to do Donald Trump's bidding until they found Chuck. Under his name, they've sent numerous requests to all the agencies to collect information on government employees that they see as a threat to their agenda. Instructions say to send these lists to Amanda Scales. But Amanda is not actually an OPM employee.

She works for Elon Musk. She wasn't even properly cleared by OPM personnel security. Our CIO, Melvin Brown, also a non-political career public servant, was pushed aside just one week into his tenure. because he refused to set up email lists to send out direct communications to all career civil servants. Such communications are normally left up to each agency. Instead, an on-prem, on-site email server was set up. Someone literally walked into our building and plugged in an email server to our network to make it appear that emails were coming from OPM. It's been the one sending those various test messages you've all seen. We think they're building a massive email list of all

federal employees to generate mass RAF notices down the road. The non-political civil servants here at OPM are watching helplessly as our government is being systematically dismantled bit by bit. Even the IGs are being fired to prevent them from investigating the numerous whistleblower complaints we've filed. Please share this and tell the world that OPM is not the bad guy. We're just as helpless to stop this as the rest of our fellow public servants. Hopefully someone out there can help us, but it's looking pretty grim.

While Project 2025 and similar initiatives have been public about their plans to reshape the federal workforce, Trump and other figures in his administration have denied or downplayed links with the initiative. These documents provide further evidence that the implementation is already well underway, with designated personnel quietly drafting policies that were intended only to be publicly attributed to those in charge of the federal agencies. A final note, the OPM has since scrubbed the PDF metadata in the links I provide in this article. However, the archived copies linked in the post contain the original metadata. Thanks for listening to this issue of the citation needed newsletter. If you would like to support my work with a free or pay what you want subscription to the citation needed newsletter,

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