Armed with rhetoric about the “deep state”, a conservative-backed group is planning to publicly name and shame career government employees that they consider hostile to Donald Trump.

This “blacklist” of civil servants, which will be published online, is intended to advance Trump’s broader goals, which, if elected, include weeding out government employees and replacing them with loyalists.

The group behind the list is the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), which was founded in 2020 and describes its mission as “working non-stop to expose the left’s secrets and hold Biden accountable”. A 2022 New Yorker profile described AAF as a “conservative dark-money group” and “slime machine”.

Backed with a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation, an influential rightwing thinktank, AAF will compile information, including social media posts, about civil servants they suspect will “obstruct and sabotage a future conservative president”. They plan to publish dossiers on those non-public facing individuals, starting with the Department of Homeland Security, and expose them to scrutiny.