‘It’s Elon Versus Everyone’: A Dire Warning From Fired Federal Workers

Maximillian Alvarez: We are recording today’s episode on Monday, February 24, and things just keep getting more hectic, absurd and terrifying by the minute.

I wish it could be taken for granted that people see right through all of this, that they see federal workers like yourselves as human beings and understand the incalculable impact that this techno-fascist coup and all these firings are going to have on all of us, that they see Musk and his drugged out, neo-Nazi, insane clown CEO posts and nakedly self-serving, corrupt behavior, and they see him for what he is, and that they see the Trump administration and all this oligarch-led destruction and reordering of our government, our economy and our society to serve their profit and power motives. But we know that we can’t take that for granted, because Musk, Trump, Fox News, the entire right-wing media apparatus and the social media algorithms controlling our feeds, they’re all pushing the narrative that this is righteous vengeance against the anti-American Deep State, against ​“wokeness” and waste. And a lot of people are buying it.

Walk us through what this has all looked like for you three over the past week or so, and what you want people to know about what’s actually happening to our government in real life, in real time?

Cat Farman: I’ve been working at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) now for 10 years. When I got this job, I was excited because I had been working in tech before that. It felt like I was just being exploited to create something for someone else’s profit, spending a lot of my life building very detail-oriented code bases and designs for someone to just sell pizza. It didn’t feel very useful. So I was really excited that the folks at CFPB were hiring and that it was to do work using my technology background to actually provide a socially useful service to the public, like consumer complaint databases that helped people with issues with big banks, mortgage lending services or student loans. 

Working at the Bureau, I realized that benefits like job stability, pensions and a decent pay — things that I had always ascribed to government jobs — actually come from unions, who fought and won them. It’s been eye-opening to realize that we rest on all this labor history that brought us where we are today. And the CFPB union is a part of that, which is one reason we’re under attack right now. The Right is trying to paint us as faceless D.C. bureaucrats or suits in Washington, when really, we’re your neighbors. We’re working people providing services to working people for free, funded by the government. Because Elon Musk can’t make a buck off of it, he’s coming to shut us down, to steal our data and fire our workers illegally.

Jasmine McAllister: These people have dedicated their whole lives to accumulating wealth and power, and they want to keep doing that. It’s like a machine that can’t be satisfied. They’re bad bosses who make people work in factories in a natural disaster. Their strategy of destroying organized labor, destroying the federal services, destroying the federal workforce, is to make them the only big, bad bosses in town. 

To do that, they cause chaos and confusion. I was fired two weeks ago, but that firing was illegal. The news is covering these layoffs as something that’s allowed to happen, ignoring all the rules and processes. So I get texts from my parents, who saw a headline saying ​‘Musk is saying people should resign if they don’t reply to this email,’ but really, Elon Musk is not in our chain of command. It’s being covered as fact, when really, he isn’t anyone’s boss.

Alvarez: Essentially, the culmination of the GOP trifecta control of government is that no one in Congress is doing anything about the blatantly illegal actions of the unelected, richest man in the world taking a meat cleaver to our government agencies.

McAllister: Exactly, and in the absence of leadership from Congress, it’s on each of us as individuals, both as federal workers and as American citizens to do what’s in our power. Our union has been reminding people of their rights and obligations, to do what our bosses tell us to do rather than following orders of someone not in my chain of command. Don’t be scared into complying, because of this chaos and confusion. We need to remain clear-eyed about the processes that make our democracy work.

Will Munger: I work in rural Idaho and Montana, mostly with ranchers working on public lands as well as the managers responsible for the land and the scientists doing research for the betterment of the land. It’s not just about producing food, but also new kinds of asks like conservation of biodiversity to help mitigate climate change and dealing with rapidly changing rural communities and land fragmentation. Having a federal Agricultural Research Service is important because we do the public interest research that the private sector doesn’t.

My team and I were on the way back from a Society for Range Management meeting when we got the call that we were fired. It was a shock for us. What I really want to uphold and call attention to is the impact that these mass terminations have on rural communities out West. These are rangers, firefighters, locksmiths, mulepackers, educators. It’s a real range of people that have been hit, with some ranger districts having lost 50% of their crews. There has been a number of protests in these small towns (McCall, Idaho, Flagstaff, Arizona and my hometown of Logan, Utah) with thousands coming out to stand up for the public servants who take care of our lands and serve our interests. And these aren’t Democrats, they’re mostly red states, conservative agricultural communities whose projects are being attacked.

It’s important to recognize that we can bridge the urban world divide and listen to each other. We can really think about the point of public service and public science and realize the good they bring.

Alvarez: From our first episode, we’ve been trying to show that our fellow workers, who are doing the unsung work that makes our society and economy run, are human beings just like you.

Can each of you talk more about what your day-to-day work entailed before the madness of the second Trump administration? How did that work contribute directly and indirectly to the public good?

Farman: We learn from past disasters, like the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression and the Great Recession. We learn that there needs to be oversight by the government so these Wall Street banks don’t crash the economy and screw over the American people on such a scale again. That includes regulating the mortgage market, auto loan market, the lenders, and financial products. That’s what the CFPB was created to do.

But here we are again, greed is attacking us and creating disastrous economic effects already. We’re in this new gilded age where the billionaires are running away with everything again and seeing if they’ll get away with it. [The CFPB] must remain as a social counterbalance to these forces of greed, corruption, corporate malfeasance, and fraud by the billionaires of the CEO class.

McAllister: I was doing similar work at the state level before coming to CFPB — labor laws, voting rights access, consumer financial protection. I’ve spent many years building these skills up through complicated work as a data scientist, working with lawyers who develop their legal theories and analyzing millions of rows of data. But the excuse that was given for these illegal firings was that it was ​‘performance-based,’ but it’s just not possible that all of us weren’t performing our jobs. It’s just a loophole they’re using.

Munger: For the constituency I work with, we’re doing important genetic, epidemiological and community-based research for complicated agricultural and public lands management issues. We work with ranchers to find out the issues most important to them, to do scientific research relevant to their livelihoods — projects years in the making. We build relationships with livestock producers as well as the environmental groups who have conflicts with them. It takes a long time to build trust, and a really specialized team of geneticists, ecologists, social scientists, collaborative experts and facilitators to make these things happen. So when you decimate that, it has a real impact on people. It’s not a political game in the rural West. These are operators who work on thin margins. These are wildlife populations that have been endangered and are on the road to recovery. But we’re now seeing efforts to take over public lands, billionaires buying up working ranches and turning them into resorts, into third, fourth or fifteenth homes.

It’s disorienting, with so much news in our feed. But that’s the flood-the-zone strategy, which uses shock to make us forget that our web of relationships are connected and responsible to one another. Whether that’s a union working in a big city, or a community group working out in the rural West, we need to continue to uplift and take care of each other during this hard time.

Farman: We’re fighting for ourselves. One of my union comrades put it perfectly: it’s not Elon vs. ​“the government,” it’s Elon vs. Everyone.

So we have to fight back. We don’t really have a choice. People subsist on the government and its public services because they are public goods democratically created by the people for the people. We’re continuing to be in the streets and in the courts and everywhere we need to be, on this podcast and the radio shows, to sound the alarm, fight back and get people to join our fight. The CFPB union has people everywhere, doing pickets in major cities, going to Tesla dealerships where Musk makes his money, and outside of big banks. Your local Congress member needs to feel the heat and answer for what is happening.

McAllister: I have to plug ​“5calls​.org.” They make it really easy to call your elected representatives.

Munger: In rural communities, town halls are particularly important. Show up to these protests down at the courthouse, but also talk to the folks at your local bars and churches to have this conversation from the bottom up. We need to take care of each other, building relationships with people who are different from us, because the billionaires want us separated. We’ve got to stick together.