James Sherk authored the joint Office of Management and Budget and OPM memo (archive) on return to office implementation plans. The guidance in the memo echoes a November 20, 2024 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy outlining their “Doge Plan”, where they wrote: “Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome”.4 The memo has earned criticism from the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union, which expressed that the directive would “undermine” the government’s effectiveness by limiting their ability to attract talented employeees and maintain continuity of operations in emergencies. Sherk also authored the joint OMB and OPM memo (archive) providing guidance on the federal civilian hiring freeze — another effort towards the goal of slashing the size of the federal workforce.

James Sherk was announced as Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy on January 18. A White House official during Trump’s first term, Sherk was a key figure in Trump’s endeavors to purge civil servants and replace them with loyalists through an effort known as “Schedule F”. After Biden was elected, he repealed Schedule F, and Sherk slunk off to the America First Policy Institute to continue efforts to advance Trump’s policies. Prior to these positions, he was a staff member at the Heritage Foundation.

While Project 2025 and similar initiatives have been public about their plans to reshape the federal workforce, Trump and other figures in his administration have denied or downplayed links with the initiative. These documents show that implementation is already well underway, with designated personnel quietly drafting policies that were intended only to be publicly attributed to those in charge of the federal agencies.

mollywhite.net/micro/entry/tru…

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The people who are now in charge of the Office of Personnel Management apparently don’t know how to scrub PDF metadata, and have exposed the original authors of the guidance they’re publishing. Two have links to the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025.

Noah Peters is the author of the OPM Acting Director Charles Ezell’s January 27 memo (archive) providing guidance on the “Restoring Accountability To Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce” executive order, which is being described as the “Schedule F” order because it effectively reinstates that policy under a new name (“Schedule Policy/Career”). Peters also authored the January 20 memo (archive) from Ezell, which exploits loopholes to bypass limits on political appointments. Both of these memos are clear steps towards achieving a primary goal of Project 2025: to expand President Trump’s power, and to replace career civil servants with Trump loyalists.

As far back as 2023, The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 was recommending Peters for a position in Trump’s second administration. Peters had previously been appointed by Trump in 2019 as the Solicitor at the Federal Labor Relations Authority, where he “aided and defended Trump appointees’ anti-union FLRA policies that went against decades of the agency’s own precedents” according to Court Accountability Action and State Democracy Defenders Action.4 Peters returned to private practice in 2022, but recently quietly updated his LinkedIn profile to reflect a new title of “Senior Advisor” to the Office of Personnel Management. This appointment does not appear to have been announced anywhere else.

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#USpolitics #USpol #Project2025 #HeritageFoundation