The Madison Square Garden Rally Is a Vision of a Second Trump Term

Vought’s comments are reminiscent of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda, to which he was a contributor. He emphasized the need for the president and his close allies to seize total control of the executive branch. “The President must set and enforce a plan for the executive branch,” Vought wrote in the project’s manifesto. “Sadly, however, a President today assumes office to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences—or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country.”

Among Vought’s hopes for a second term, according to ProPublica, is a war on federal civil servants, whom he wants to purge in favor of ideologically sympathetic appointees. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”

Those who aren’t “traumatically afflicted” might be summarily dismissed instead. In 2020, Trump issued a last-minute executive order that would have made it theoretically possible to fire thousands of federal civil servants by reassigning them to a category known as Schedule F, bypassing the civil service protections in federal law that would otherwise protect them. The executive order was never carried out before Trump left office, and President Joe Biden repealed it shortly after he was sworn in, but Trump loyalists have salivated about the prospect of reviving it should Trump win in November.