The Center for American Progress (CAP), an independent, nonpartisan policy institute, reports workers are “winning a greater percentage of NLRB-overseen union elections than at any point in the past 15 years as Biden administration appointees help protect workers’ right to organize.” However, the organization cautions, “A conservative policy plan, Project 2025, offers a blueprint for eroding the NLRB’s ability to protect organizing workers.”
Project 2025 is led by the right-wing Heritage Foundation and former top Trump Administration officials. The 920-page agenda seeks to dismantle environmental protections, eliminate the Department of Education, further roll back abortion rights, and eliminate or weaken any gains workers have won. In fact, Project 2025 calls for the NLRB general counsel and other federal employees’ jobs to be eliminated “on day one” of a possible Trump presidency.
The plan also calls for the NLRB to reinstate a 2019 standard that allowed many workers to be classified as independent contractors, leaving them without the legal ability to organize in the workplace. Further, Project 2025 would reinstate Trump-era rules that gave anti-union companies more freedom to fight organizing campaigns and allowed them to more easily avoid liability for labor violations by relying on third parties to staff their workforce.
According to CAP, under the Biden administration, the NLRB is helping ensure that workers can exercise their legal right to come together in unions, with more workers winning elections and more workers getting help to get back on the job when fired illegally for protected organizing activity. However, those gains would be eroded should Project 2025 be enacted, and the NLRB’s enforcement capacity gutted.
The Project 2025 plan also proposes reviving the Trump Schedule F policy that would try to reclassify tens of thousands of federal workers as political appointees. In what sounds like McCarthyism, the Heritage Foundation is financing a project at the American Accountability Foundation that aims to investigate federal employees suspected of being hostile to the policies of Donald Trump. According to PBS, Tom Jones, owner of the American Accountability Foundation, is digging into the backgrounds, social media posts and commentary of key high-ranking government employees. PBS reports that the “goal is to post 100 names of government workers to a website this summer to show a potential new administration who might be standing in the way of a second-term Trump agenda—and ripe for scrutiny, reclassifications, reassignments or firings.
In announcing its $100,000 award to fund the project, the Heritage Foundation said it would support the American Accountability Foundation’s “investigative researchers, in-depth reports, and educational efforts to alert Congress, a conservative administration, and the American people to the presence of anti-American bad actors burrowed into the administrative state and ensure appropriate action is taken.”
The group is reportedly focusing on the highest-ranking civil servants and those in senior executive positions.
Jacqueline Simon, policy director at the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), said the language being used in the Heritage Foundation announcement is “shocking. It just seems as though their goal is to try to menace federal employees and sow fear.”
Democracy Forward, a national legal organization that advances democracy and social progress through litigation, policy and public education, and regulatory engagement, is sounding the alarm about Project 2025, “Project 2025 is one of the most profound threats the American people face today,” says the organization’s president and CEO, Skye Perryman. “From attacking reproductive rights and workplace safety laws, to allowing more discrimination, pollution and price gouging, the far-right interests behind Project 2025 are preparing to go to incredible lengths to implement a dangerous and deeply unpopular agenda.”
