Cindi Branham
Coming into a time of Thanksgiving, salvation-celebrating and merrymaking, it may feel like – at least on the national level – there’s not a lot to be thankful for or to celebrate.
Who could blame some of us? We’ve just seen a highly vindictive, destructive, self-centered felon and adjudicated rapist win out over a highly qualified, experienced, intelligent and compassionate woman at the ballot box.
For the second time in eight years.
And we know from experience that this time will be worse; that all the “things” that held him back the last time around will be systematically dismantled to give him free reign over us and all we know.
I know in my gut that it will hit some of us harder than others, and the thing I’ve been wondering most for nearly a month now is whether there’s any salvation. How do we help each other? How do we get through four more years of Trump? Will it be only four years?
What do we do next? Everyone I encounter is asking what’s next. I think it’s too soon to know, but we can’t let our grief take too long, can we?
Yes, I’m writing to those who supported the Democratic ticket, and I realize that may not be all my readers. That bothers me, but I’m on a hunt for the light here. I also can’t let myself ignore the darks shadows in the light; the ones that may overtake the light.
So here’s a start.
Schedule F. Have you heard of it? It’s a little thing that Trump introduced in the latter weeks of his first term to help him remove the very federal workers who were standing in the way of his attempts to turn the US Government into his own revenge weapon and grift target.
Those protections of federal workers literally kept Trump from weaponizing the entire federal government against his perceived domestic “enemies.”
In October of 2020 through an executive order, the Trump Administration tried to strip protections from civil servants perceived as disloyal to the president. Not to the Constitution. Not to the American people, but to a narcissist power-grabber who can’t not be at the center of attention.
The criteria now are simple and simplistic, far more simplistic than the agencies they’ll be running: absolute expressions of allegiance to the president prior to hiring.
The effort is referred to as “Schedule F” because that was the name of the new employment category that the executive order created. Trump will surely resurrect this schedule to get around being able to fire federal employees at will.
Trump expanded the definition of who could be fired in schedule F based on expanding the interpretation of language that exempted certain positions “of a confidential, policy-determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating character” from employment protections. Previous administrations and Congress understood the language to apply only to a smaller number of positions traditionally filled by political appointees.
Appointees, not career employees. Trump’s schedule F dives more deeply into the levels of management in our agencies. With this in place, he will fire all top layers of government who aren’t loyalists and replace them with people who take orders and carry them out.
DOGE. The Department of Government Efficiency, to be led by two Trump sycophants who display all the characteristics of people who are completely out of touch with the lives of common Americans: Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy: perfect bedfellows for 45: They will lie their way to our mutual discomfort, dismay, & destruction.
Books will be written in the future about the dangers of giving these two wealthy pathological narcissists the keys to the bank, but for now, they’re behaving as if they were children given the keys to the candy store.
Musk is already talking about fat and mismanagement in the US military. I trust that they will look to Putin for the plan on military cuts. We know that there are places and projects there that need scrutiny but watch for when the cuts start to weaken our defenses.
Ramaswamy is explaining now he’ll use civil servants’ Social Security numbers to choose which will be eliminated. Evens and odds.
If the government itself cannot fight for us, who will be left to fight for us? Maybe no one internally, but we may see non-government organizations (NGOs) step up.
The known NGOs like NAACP, ACLU and SPLC will be there. I have faith that they will. I’m less sure about how far they can take the rights of the American people with so much resistance from within our own government – one that’s intent on destroying our government.
There are many other organizations to watch – Democracy Docket (Voting Rights legal team), Democracy 2025 (Democracy Forward) and American Federation of government Workers (AFGE) will be there, even as Trump 2.0 seeks ways to hamstring them by labeling them terrorist organizations.
How successful any of these organizations will be is unknown. Project 2025 not only looked at the social changes a small group of people wanted; it looked at how to stop any entity in the country from stopping Trump and to remove those obstacles.
How will our Alabama Republican delegation react when those cuts hit home?
Their past behavior isn’t promising.
I’m not going to tell you our government is perfect and that its inherent bureaucracy is acceptable. We all know that it’s not.
Still, I don’t think we want to see it occupied and controlled by people who know nothing about and care less for the missions of these agencies, but rather loyalists who don’t understand – or care about – the services that those agencies exist for in the first place.
And if you think that the bureaucracy, red tape and dysfunctionality of some agencies will get better under weakened leadership and structure with smaller staffs, you’ll be in for a surprise. When service is no longer a part of the mission, the service does not improve.
Does it?
Where will we find our light?
