The Daily Signal - Uncovering ‘Deep State’ Civil Servants Who Should Be Ousted

Episode Date: August 21, 2024

When a new president is elected, especially when that president is from a different party from the previous administration, personnel changes ensue. But just as important as who a new president should hire for his or her administration is the consideration of who to fire, or at least remove from positions significant influence, according to the president of the conservative oversight organization American Accountability Foundation.  Through an initiative called Project Sovereignty 2025, Thomas Jones is working to compile a list of “deep state” civil servants currently working on immigration policy who would likely not support a conservative administration’s border policies.  “A lot of the people who come into the civil service in this space, their career and their ideology is … they think mass migration into the United States is a good, it’s important that we let these people in, and it’s their life goal to really make that policy happen,” Jones said.  He argues that anyone who thinks government employees who have spent the past four years “allowing migrants into the United States” will suddenly support a conservative administration’s plan to deport mass numbers of illegal aliens does not understand “how government works.” Jones joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the agenda and the implementation of Project Sovereignty 2025.  Enjoy the show! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, August 21st. I'm Virginia Allen. Just as important as who to hire in a new conservative presidential administration is also the question of who needs to go. Well, the president of the American Accountability Foundation, Tom Jones, is making a list of those names right now. The organization is doing investigation into who are the people in the Biden administration that if former president Donald Trump wins the election. election in November might not exactly be on board with some of Trump's policies. They're asking tough questions and looking at how former President Donald Trump could have a clear runway to further his policies if he is elected. Stay tuned for my conversation with Tom Jones as he discusses the work that his organization, the American Accountability Foundation, is doing right now to prepare

for the possibility of a conservative administration come 2025. So what is going on with Ukraine? What is this deal with the border? How do you feel about school choice? These are the questions that come up to conservatives sitting at parties, at dinner, at family reunions. What do you say when these questions come up? I'm Mark Geine, the host of the podcast for you. Heritage Explains brought to you by all of your friends here at the Heritage Foundation.

Through the creative use of stories, the knowledge of our super passionate experts, we bring you the most important policy issues of the day and break them down in a way that is understandable. So check out Heritage Explains wherever you get your podcasts. Well, it's my honor to have with us on the podcast today, the president of the American Accountability Foundation, Tom Jones. Mr. Jones, thanks so much for your time today. I really appreciate you joining us.

Hey, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. So let's go ahead and start. with the mission of the American Accountability Foundation. You all provide oversight, but explain if you would. What exactly does that mean? And why were you all founded? Sure. So we're modeled after kind of the opposition resource function that you would have in a political campaign. So you'd have a group of researchers who have a really broad depth of skill of investigating people generally and helping tell a story about who those people are and why or why not they should be. be leaders. So you have that technical skill set, but you also have a mindset that's focused on

kind of rapid response and engaging in the debate with information that resonates with the American people. So I had been doing that for decades for campaigns, you know, from presidential down to local races. And I really looked around the conservative movement. And I didn't see a similar capability for the movement outside of the campaign space. And I said, look, the left, had this particularly when a lot of good conservatives were nominated to the Trump administration, but we don't have this capability in the conservative movement. So I decided, hey, this is something we should build and it's kind of an investigatory skill set that the movement really needs. So work to build that out in 2021, focusing, you know, initially on nominees, but as that nominee

tempo faded as the administration moved along, shifted to focus to other leaders on the left, whether they be in universities, in the military, or in big Wall Street firms. That's really the kind of the focus organization and effort of A.A.F. Interesting. Okay. So we're right now less than three months out from an election. There's a lot of work across Washington, D.C. in the conservative movement in preparation for what might happen in November. And the American Accountability Foundation, you all have taken a really, a really poignant position here. And you're looking in, into information related to, okay, who are the people and who aren't the people that should be in the government if former President Donald Trump wins in November. Explain if you would a little bit

about a project you all are working on called Project Sovereignty 2025. What is that? Yeah, so we think, you know, there's kind of two marquee issues that the American people are really concerned about, inflation and immigration. And what we wanted to do was focus on that immigration space. And we wanted to take a different tack than I think even folks on the left have taken. And what we wanted to do was look at the people in the civil service who are making the decisions at the most senior levels with regard to immigration policy and implementation of rules to control our border and to protect our communities within the interior. So, you know, there's a lot of people who will look at kind of the political appointees and things like that. And we do a lot of that. But nobody's really focused in on this cadre of civil servants, you know, folks, kind of the administrative

state, the deep state, the bureaucratic state, nobody really focuses on those people as individuals. And I think it's a really neglected space because these folks who, and I'll get down in the weeds a little bit, you know, the GS-15s, the senior executive service, at the end of the day, these folks make a lot of decisions about how rules are implemented and how the president's agenda is executed on. And no one knows who they are and no one knows what they're. biases are. So what we said is, look, there's an important opportunity to educate the American people and most importantly, the next administration about who is in the offices that are going to be important to implement these. Are these people biased? Are they going to be able to execute on

the agenda that the American people say they want it? So we've started that project. I'm happy to talk about it on digging into these people, you know, kind of name by name to say, hey, is this person the right fit for where they are right now? And if they're not, I think it's probably incumbent upon the next administration to say, look, you need to be somewhere else within the government. You can't be on the front lines of executing on immigration policy because you just don't support the policy that the American people have decided that they want to implement it. Okay, so this is going deeper than government appointees, than presidential appointees, to look at people that have risen up through the levels of government work. And if you would, just sort of clarify, though, because you can't necessarily fire those. as individuals, correct? It's just a game of shuffling because once you kind of reach certain levels

in the government, it's pretty hard to actually get people out of the door. Yeah, I'm not a constitutional attorney. I think there's, I think there's an argument to be made that the president has broad powers to hire and fire people within the executive branch. But yeah, I think that's an open question. But yeah, there's a lot of important proposals out there. I think at the end of the last administration, we saw something called Schedule F, where they said, look, if you're in a policymaking position and you're a senior civil servant making policy, you're going to be treated similarly to a Schedule C appointee and giving the president the ability to remove those folks if they don't fit. But look, there's a lot of tools that the administration has

if someone's just not the right fit. I think America is better served. if we have some senior civil servant making $150,000 who's hostile to controlling the border, America's well served. If we have that guy sitting in an office somewhere else, not doing immigration policy, I'd rather eat the $150,000 a year and not allow that guy to make mischief, then let him stay in his position and obstruct the agenda that the American people elected the president to implement. So, you know, I can talk a lot about what the offices are and where these people are.

But at the end of the day, I think if the president says, look, I learned during my last administration that there's a lot of people in the civil service who are going to block my agenda and I'm not going to let them do it again, I think he has a lot of tools at his disposal to make sure that doesn't happen again. Yeah. If you would, dig into what you all have been finding. I know you're not at a point where you're going to start naming names, but what have you guys discovered? Yeah. So there's a, so, you know, immigration center of an interesting space. You know, kind of post 9-11, we chomel. up the way we have immigration policy and implementation handled across the government. So what we've seen is kind of there's two big buckets of kind of civil servants that are really important to look at, the folks at the Department of Justice and the folks at the Department of Homeland Security. Department of Homeland Security, we've got a lot of offices.

And really, USCIS is probably the worst offender on hiring left-wing radicals. And what we've seen, I mean, look, honestly, we saw it during the Trump administration. As a lot of folks got into the civil service who, when you look at their background and you kind of scratch beyond the level, they were working for left-wing immigration groups who really have an open borders agenda. And that's really been supercharged during the Biden administration. So they've really filled the civil service with folks whose career has been to really supercharge migration from Latin America into the southern states and really into the interior and wanted policies that. that would do that. Over at DOJ, it's just as bad. DoJ is in charge of what's called immigration judges. And these are kind of the guys that are saying, you're either staying or you're going. And unfortunately, the Biden administration through attorney general Garland has been aggressive in appointing immigration judges who just let everybody stay and who won't, won't effectuate deportations, even when they see some kind of the worst offenders.

And we want to show those backgrounds, both kind of what they've been doing on deportation, but also who they are. Again, what I tell people is you have to think of it this way. A lot of the people who come into the civil service in this space, their career and their ideology and their personality is about they think mass migration into the United States is a good. It's important that we let these people in. And it's their life goal to really make that policy happen. And if you think they're going to get up on January 21st after there's a new conservative administration, you go, you know what? I spent the last four years allowing migrants into the United States because I think that's the right thing to do. But today I'm going to deport a whole bunch of people.

And I'm going to really do my best to help the administration affect mass deportations and to close the southern border. If you think those people are going to do that, I think you just don't understand how government works and really how people that go into the space work. At the end of the day, it'd be like asking me to come up with a good pro-choice policy. Like, my brain doesn't work that way. And I think we have to understand that. And just because you have a GS rating attached to your name doesn't mean that you're unbiased and you check your biases at the door. So I think this part of education is really going to be eye-opening for the next administration. Yeah.

So many ways it's about being honest about human nature and what is human nature. How long do you anticipate this list being when all of a sudden done? How many names do you think might be on there? There's about 100 folks in really kind of this most senior level that we want to outline for the next administration. And look, like, we don't care about the secretary in the office, the secretary with a small S. We do care about the secretary. But we don't care about the secretary of the administrator or, you know, Border Patrol agents. What we care about is, you know, there's something called the senior executive service,

which is the, exactly as it sounds, the most senior civil servants within government. We care about those individuals in the immigration space. And then kind of the next level down, which is GS-15, and then these immigration judges over at the Department of Justice. And I think if the administration can, you know, find a new home for these, you know, roughly 100 folks, I think what they'll find is that the immigration policy that the American people elected them to implement, will go through a lot quicker. We saw that in the last administration, is that honestly, some of these same people

that we're looking at now, we're in positions to say, oh, geez, I don't think we can do the wall. I don't know that we can, you know, build that like that. And I need to write you a memo. We're going to have to wait some months. And that regulation is really complicated. We can't get it out the door.

You know, these guys know how to work the system. And they're able to kind of game it out and slow roll it and really ride it out until there's a new administration. We just can't let that happen because fundamentally it's undemocratic. The American people say we want this policy and for a bunch of unelected bureaucrats who no one knows who they are to obstruct that, is just fundamentally wrong. Was anything like this done in 2016 before Trump was elected the first time? No, and I really don't think that's kind of one of the things that is important to us. I don't think anyone's really focused on this civil service court.

There's certainly been attention on, hey, how do we fix the process? problem. But I don't think there's anyone has ever really said, hey, here's the folks that are that are a problem. And, you know, John Smith in the, you know, the civil rights and civil liberties division at the Department of Homeland Security can't be in this position any longer. I don't think, I don't even think, honestly, that the left is, is even really done this in the past. Now, the left hasn't done it because most of the civil services staff by leftists. So they don't really need to be like, hey, let's get our, let's get people out of here that are obstructing our agenda. So I think it's a really, it's a new and novel approach.

Yeah. Wow. So with so many changes over the, gosh, the past month, six weeks, we've seen drastic changes as we're headed up to this election. You all have also looked at some of those developments, including Biden choosing to step out of the race and how that came about. And you all have actually asked the House to investigate, was Biden pressured, under threat of the 25th Amendment to step out of the race. Talk a little bit about that. And you're thinking at the American Accountability Foundation as to, okay, this actually could have been a tool and the House needs to look into this situation.

Yeah, I think this is a really kind of a dramatic constitutional crisis that really hasn't been investigated. Look, unless you were living under Iraq, you could see that President Biden, Biden's cognitive decline was happening over a number of years. The disastrous debate that he had wasn't kind of an all of a sudden event. It had been happening for a long time. And so I think the, you know, Vice President Harris and the cabinet certainly knew that. And I think at some point there were discussions about how do we use the 25th Amendment to pressure the president to get out of the race. And look, at the end of the day, I think that's a black letter law extortion. They used

their official position to force someone to do something that they wouldn't have otherwise done. So I think what the House of Representatives needs to do is find out how this happened. You know, at some point, the vice president talked to other people in the administration, talk to people on the outside, whether it's Nancy Pelosi or President Obama and said, look, we got to have a talk with Joe here and make it clear to him that if he doesn't find the door on his own, we're going to find the door for him via the 25th Amendment. Now, look, I think the 25th Amendment should have been invoked because President Biden doesn't have the capability to execute on his office because he is, he's just fundamentally cognitively impaired.

But that's because I think I'm reached that decision because I just don't think he can do the job anymore. clearly President Harris, Vice President Harris said, look, I'm going to threaten you because I want to be the candidate. And I mean, geez, I think that rises to a level beyond, you know, some guys breaking into the Watergate Hotel at night. Like this is, it's essentially a coup. What Vice President Harris did was saying, look, I'm going to use some tools I have here and I'm going to extort the President of the United States to allow him to. to allow him to force me to be the candidate for the party when no one has voted for me. That, like, I'm kind of gobsmacked at how that's not shocking to Americans and frankly, how it's not shocking to Republican leadership in the House to say, we want the documents now,

we want the conversations, we want the phone calls, we want to know what, you know, Pete Buttigieg said to VP Harris on this date, and we're going to do it with your right hand in the air, swearing under penalty of perjury that you had to tell us. the truth. If this isn't something worth the House investigating, I'm hard-pressed to understand what it is. The House is obviously on recess right now, but they'll be back in September. Has leadership given you any indication that they're going to take this up? Yeah, I know they read our letter, but, I mean, unfortunately, I haven't seen any movement that they're going to take this up. I know that they're obviously rightfully, you know, spending a lot of time focusing on the assassination investigation,

but I'm pretty sure the House of Representatives can kind of walk and chew bubble gum at the same time. They've got a lot of committees and a lot of staffers up there. It's disappointing that they haven't said, hey, we need to understand how this soft coup happened in our country while everybody was focusing on the presidential election. Yeah. One of the other actions that you all have recently taken is calling or filing rather an ethics complaint against Representative Ilhan Omar. Why did you all do that? Explain that situation. Yeah, unfortunately, I think she very clear. had foreign influence in her congressional election. What we saw were, you know, foreign, you know,

foreign officials from the Sudan coming in and weighing in her community, which is, you know, that it's a very prominent community in her state and in her district, and it was very powerful. But look, foreign officials should have zero influence over American elections. And it's a long been a prohibited practice to allow foreigners to contribute things of value to campaigns, whether it's a monetary donation or time and influence.

And this guy was raising money. It was out there calling on people to donate to her campaign and was out in the district campaigning for. Like, foreigners should have no role in American elections. I mean, we spent years hearing about, you know, the Russian hoax and all that. Like, we've literally got a Sudanese, you know, former prime minister stumping for a U.S. representative fundraising for her out in her district. It's, again, like, in normal times, this would be embarrassing and the subject of immediate

investigation. And right now we're just kind of, I don't know what the ethics committee is doing, but I'm worried that they're just waving at it. Yeah. So many critical issues you guys are tackling right now. Mr. Jones, tell the listeners if they want to get involved, if they not only want to follow your work, but want to partner with you guys, how do they do that? Well, the best way is to follow us on Twitter X. We're at exposing Biden on on, on X. And that's really where we try to break most of our news. But we've got a great substack every Friday. I'm sorry, every Sunday we're putting out new research findings.

So find us on Substack, American Accountability Foundation. And then our website, American-A-F.org. We'll get you to the main site and get you all our information and our findings. Excellent. Tom Jones, president of the American Accountability Foundation. Thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. Hey, thanks for having me on.

And with that, that's going to do it for today's episode. Thanks so much for joining us here on the Daily Signal Podcast. Make sure you hit that subscribe button. Do you never miss out on new shows, whether our morning interview editions or our afternoon Top News? We'll see you right back here around 5 p.m. for Top News. And in the meantime, if you have a second, would you leave the Daily Signal podcast a five-star rating and review?

We would love to hear what you think about the show and what you want to hear more of. Have a great rest of your Wednesday. We'll see you back here at 5 for Top News. The Daily Signal podcast is made possible because of listeners like you. Executive producers are Rob Louis and Katrina Trinko. Hosts are Virginia Allen, Brian Gottstein, Tyler O'Neill, Mary Margaret O'Lehand, and Elizabeth Mitchell. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, John Pop, and Joseph von Spakovsky. To learn more or support our work, please visit DailySignal.com.