Vought’s comments are reminiscent of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 program, to which he contributed. He stressed the need for the president and his close allies to take full control of the executive branch. “The president must establish and implement a plan for the executive branch,” Vought wrote in the project’s manifesto. “Unfortunately, today, a president who takes office finds himself facing a sprawling federal bureaucracy that, too often, implements its own plans and policy preferences – or, even worse, the plans and policy preferences of one faction radical, so-called “awakened”, power. the country. »

Among Vought’s hopes for a second term, according to ProPublica, is a war on federal officials, whom he wants to purge in favor of ideologically sympathetic appointees. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatized,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them not to want to go to work because they are increasingly seen as bad guys. We want their funding cut off so the EPA can’t enforce every rule against our energy industry because they don’t have the financial bandwidth to do so. We want to traumatize them.

Those who are not “traumatized” could be fired without notice. In 2020, Trump issued a last-minute decree that would have made it theoretically possible to lay off thousands of federal employees by reassigning them to a category known as Annex Fcircumventing civil service protections under federal law that would otherwise protect them. The executive order was never enforced before Trump left office, and President Joe Biden rescinded it shortly after being sworn in, but Trump loyalists salivated at the prospect of reinstating it if Trump won november.