Conservative group’s ‘watch list’ targets federal employees for firing

An organization funded by the conservative Heritage Foundation has compiled an online “watch list” of federal employees it claims cannot be trusted to secure the U.S. border and should be fired, a sign that supporters of Donald Trump’s immigration policies are preparing to help him neutralize the administrative state they believe tried to thwart his first presidency.

The “DHS Bureaucrat Watch List” - a website unveiled in the final weeks of a presidential campaign in which immigration is a key issue - names 51 federal policy experts and high-ranking leaders, the majority of whom are career civil servants at the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies. The group identified them largely using public social media comments, prior work experience and campaign finance records.

Among the employees’ actions cited by the group are posts celebrating the legalization of same-sex marriage or lauding the contributions and successes of undocumented immigrants, as well as donations as little as $10 to Democratic candidates. One employee union likened the effort to unearth the private views of public employees to Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s 1950s-era campaign to purge federal workers he accused of being communists.

The site’s founder, a former Republican congressional staffer named Tom Jones, told The Washington Post that he and his staff are seeking to add more names to the list and have sent emails to more than 500 federal employees asking for their help identifying colleagues who they believe are not committed to keeping undocumented immigrants out of the country.

Jones said his goal was to expose people whom he deemed had “long-standing and deep bias” on immigration policy. In addition to tracking social media posts and political donations, Jones said he is probing for indications of past advocacy on immigration issues as well as other clues about employees’ views, such as sharing of gender pronouns and support for diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

“There are a large number of people in the administration who have dedicated their life work to helping migrants settle in the United States,” Jones said. He said it was “Pollyanna-ish” to expect that those people would turn around and enforce Trump’s plan to deport tens of millions of people and close the borders, as he has vowed.

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“These people are not going to do it. They are actually going to undermine it,” Jones said. He said he would endorse similar efforts to target employees in other agencies, including the Defense Department, Education Department and Department of Health and Human Services.

Jones said he hasn’t coordinated with Trump’s campaign or transition teams, but hopes any incoming administration would take notice of his work and use it to identify employees to terminate.

The list has already caught the attention of Trump allies in Congress, with four Republican House members writing to the head of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services demanding that the employee accused of praising undocumented immigrants be fired.

While many top-level government officials are politically aligned and appointed by presidents, the bulk of the federal workforce consists of about 2.2 million career employees who work in agencies based in Washington and around the country, carrying out policies and tending to the day-to-day operations of the country regardless of the party in charge.

In 2020, Trump issued an executive order aimed at eliminating protections for tens of thousands of civil servants by reclassifying them under a new employment category called “Schedule F.” The order did not go into effect before Biden took office and canceled it. Trump has vowed to reissue the order on the first day of his second term if he is reelected and has promised to “fire rogue bureaucrats and career politicians.”

Spokespeople for the Trump campaign and the Trump transition did not respond to requests for comment.

Reached by The Post, several of the targeted employees said they did not want to speak for fear of their jobs and their families’ safety. Others spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid attracting additional attention to themselves or violating agency policy. They said they were fearful that being targeted on a public list made them vulnerable to threats and that, if Trump wins, they would be called upon to express loyalty to Trump and his party.

“Obviously this is designed to intimidate career government officials who are civil servants trying to fulfill the mission of the department and do it across administrations and do it with integrity,” said one employee on the list.

Another said he worries about the effect of the watch list on young people in government, particularly LGBTQ+ employees, “who have to ask themselves, ‘How safe is it for me to be my own person here?’”

The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents about 86,000 members at Homeland Security, drew the parallel to McCarthy, who claimed that hundreds of State Department employees were traitorous communists and then used his congressional perch to investigate.

“It is aimed at intimidating and frightening civil servants for getting involved in serving their country,” union spokesperson Andrew Huddleston said.

Department of Homeland Security officials said the agency contacted the targeted employees to provide security support. “We are immensely proud of the more than 260,000 public servants in DHS who dedicate themselves every day to the safety and security of all Americans. We condemn in the strongest terms any effort to harass or intimidate our public servants,” DHS Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas said in a statement.

Some of the named employees work at the Department of Justice or Office of Management and Budget. A DOJ employee group focused on gender equity wrote to agency leadership Thursday, citing the watch list and warning that the effects of such activities “on workers’ mental health, professional and personal reputations, finances, and physical safety can be devastating.”

A DOJ spokesperson said that the agency takes employee security seriously and encourages workers to report any perceived threats to management. OMB did not respond to a request for comment.

Jones denied that the watch list presents security risks for named employees. “It’s a website that tells you about people who work in government. That is a noncontroversial area of research,” Jones said in an interview with The Post.

Jones previously worked for conservative Republican Sens. Ron Johnson (Wisconsin) and Jim DeMint (South Carolina). He has also done opposition research for candidates including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) during his failed 2016 run for the White House.

Jones is now the president of the nonprofit American Accountability Foundation, which was established shortly after the 2020 election and has sought to derail the confirmation of Biden appointees to political posts and judgeships. The group sought to find and publicize information about nominees on a website similar to the new watch list, featuring photographs of targets and details about their past activities and policy views. Some of the nominees the group targeted ultimately withdrew their nominations; others, including Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, were confirmed.

The American Accountability Foundation announced earlier this year it would turn its attention to government employees. It developed the DHS employee watch list with the help of $100,000 from the Heritage Foundation, a longtime center of conservative power in Washington.

Heritage’s Project 2025 policy guide for a second Trump administration - which Trump has disavowed but was written by many of his former advisers - described “large swaths” of federal workers as left-wing ideologues who undermined Trump’s policy goals during his first term.

In a May press release announcing the grant to Jones’s group, Heritage president Kevin Roberts, who led Project 2025, applauded the group for “their fight to hold our government accountable and drain it of bad actors.”

Heritage remains proud to support “critical oversight of public officials undermining America’s sovereignty and national interests,” spokesman Noah Weinrich said Friday.

Jones told The Post that he and a staff of five others produced the list after they emailed agency employees seeking the names of colleagues who might undermine an immigration crackdown. In one email sent to a Homeland Security employee and obtained by The Post, Jones explained that he was looking for the names of senior officials “who are leading the charge within the civil service for open borders.”

“If you are concerned that there are leaders in the civil service who are not committed to secure borders and preventing illegal aliens from residing in the United States, I would hope you would reach out to me with their names and details of their work enabling illegal immigration,” Jones wrote.

DHS officials warned staff last week that clicking on the list’s website could lead to malware attacks on their computers, according to emails viewed by The Post; Jones responded with a letter claiming the site is safe and warning the agency that his organization may consider legal action.

DHS officials did not respond to questions from The Post about the dispute.

Peter Jamison contributed to this report.