The Movement Supporting Public Employees Is Rising
Thousands of workers across the country hit the streets this week to declare their opposition to Trump and Musk who, under the guise of “efficiency,” are slashing and burning public services.
Sarah Jaffe
Thousands of workers hit the streets February 19, all around the country — at federal offices like the Department of Health and Human Services, at Tesla dealerships and public spaces — to declare their opposition to the slashing and burning of public services currently happening under the guise of “efficiency.”
Workers focused on billionaire Elon Musk’s power within
President Donald Trump’s new administration, through the so-called Department
of Government Efficiency (DOGE). National Park Service workers, standing in the
snow, brandished signs
reading, “Immigrants didn’t steal my job. The president did.”
At Tesla’s San Francisco office, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau workers spoke about the work they did, to cheers: “When you dispute a transaction on your credit card, and they refuse to believe you, we make them take that charge off your credit card.” In Seattle, scientists marched in protest, with one sign seeming to reference orcas attacking yachts: “Care about orcas? Support federal scientists!”
In Washington, D.C., a crowd marched to SpaceX’s office bearing signs that read “DOGE is a Trojan horse.” Tiffany Montes spoke to the rally, sharing her story of being laid off from her job at the National Park Service that Friday.
“It was actually really, really scary because I didn’t expect
that many people to be there,” she told In These Times. “When I was
handed the mic, I thought, ‘Oh, wow, suddenly I am representing thousands of
federal workers who are in the same boat as me.’ It was a huge honor to be
representing all the federal workers that had been laid off. And it was amazing
to feel all the support from the people that were there.”
Montes arrived at SpaceX before the march, she said, and “we heard this cacophony of people marching towards us and chanting and it was very cool, very powerful to see.”
(DOGE has no apparent press secretary or place to reach out directly for comment; emails sent to Tesla and SpaceX were not returned.)
Members of Congress, such as Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as local officials and labor leaders, joined the actions, but they were organized and led by the workers themselves. The protests were more than just an expression of outrage and an attempt to stop the slicing. They amounted to a massive public education project, showing the United States, in real time, the work its government actually does, and how many lives that work touches. (Of course, this administration wants to get rid of the Department of Education entirely, so they probably didn’t appreciate the gesture.)
According to Chris Dols, a member of the Federal Unionists Network, a federal employee with the Army Corps of Engineers and president of Local 98 of International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, there were maybe 35 or 40 separate actions across the country. (Dols spoke in a personal capacity, neither on behalf of the federal government nor his union.) “It’s much, much greater than I first expected when we decided less than two weeks ago to put out a call for a national day of action,” Dols said. “It’s just much bigger than we ever imagined our reach would be.”
There were the big cities, of course, but there were also actions in Newburgh, N.Y., and Eureka, Calif. “Ultimately, federal workers live in every corner of the country,” Dols added, and stressed that all of those workers will have to step up if they are to stop the cuts.
The FUN was working in collaboration with another new labor
network, Labor for Higher Education,
which had also organized actions for the day. Todd
Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors,
was in Philadelphia and said there were around 300 people present. Like the
FUN, they are targeting federal cuts and spending freezes, particularly at the
National Institutes of Health. “There’s a lot of overlap,” Wolfson noted,
between the two networks. “We’re in deep alliance.”
In New York, the Labor for Higher Ed rally marched down to join the FUN’s rally, bringing energy and solidarity to the federal workers just clocking off for the day. “It was a really nice demonstration of the necessary solidarity that we’re going to need to really build the movement,” Dols said, “because if we stop just at looking at the federal workforce, we miss the actual intent of these attacks, which is to gut the services, gut the public research, gut all the protections of our rights.”
Save Our Services, Dols added, is “a beacon call to the broader public. It’s a distress signal that we want people to come out with us.” Just a few months ago, the Federal Unionists Network was a few dozen union officers, he said, supporting one another through normal if difficult challenges on the job. Now, “We find ourselves potentially in a history-making position, and I think we’re beginning to chip away at the narrative that Musk is trying to champion.”
Montes had known that the cuts were coming but held out hope that she might be spared, though she knew that probationary employees — those in their first year or two on the job, depending on the agency — were in DOGE’s crosshairs. “Everyone loves supporting history, they love supporting the national parks,” Montes said.
“So we were all kind of holding onto this hope that just maybe we won’t get hit that hard.” But on Friday, according to Montes, she and more than 30 other people were let go from her division, which does historic restoration work on buildings. “I was part of the carpentry division, traveling to different parks across the country to work on different historic structures, whether it was an old barn or a grist mill. We do a lot of the restoration on the White House as well.” She’s based in Maryland, but noted that the division had workers in Flagstaff, Ariz., near Portland, Ore., and in St. Croix and Puerto Rico.
DOGE argues that it’s fighting inefficiency and waste, but Montes countered that her division did hard, necessary work: “Some projects were on an asphalt roof in the middle of the summer. Other projects were in the mountains and one-degree weather.” The work gets very little recognition, she said, because “[people] don’t really think about what goes into the care for these pieces of our history, which is incredibly important, especially in times like this.” She’d worked her way up from a nearly three-year internship, and when she got her full-time job, she said, “I knew that I had worked hard enough and that I had earned that position.”
And so when Montes finished sobbing over the weekend, she reached out to her union steward, who connected her with FUN, and suddenly she was on a Zoom call with other workers from across the country. “A good chunk of us were people that had worked in the position for years and just recently accepted a promotion,” Montes said. “And because of that promotion, they were put on probation, so a lot of them got fired and they had worked there for eight, 10 years.”
Like Montes, those workers just wanted to do their jobs.
She encouraged people to join the rallies and contact their representatives to oppose the cuts. “This is going to affect all the American people because even just within the Park Service, we’ve lost so many employees. Parks are going to be harder to get into. There’s going to be more trash. There’s going to be less people that are available to rescue someone.”
Those effects are just starting to sink in, but they will indeed be widespread. Higher education and healthcare, which are on the chopping block from Trump and Musk, account for nearly 13% of jobs in the Philadelphia region, to choose just one example. Ben Zipperer of the Economic Policy Institute shared a tool for calculating how many federal workers are in a given state, county, town or congressional district — there are more than 10,000 just in my hometown of New Orleans, more than 2% of the workforce.
It’s still early for this administration and for DOGE, but already their approval ratings aren’t great. In one poll, 57% of respondents said Trump had exceeded his authority since taking office, and more than 8 in 10 said he should follow federal court rulings. Another poll had 45% of respondents disapproving of Musk’s work, with 41% approving and 14% neutral.
“Trump has made a massive political mistake,” Dols said, by associating himself so closely with billionaires like Musk. “I think that his anti-establishment cred is going to run out real quick. And the question for us is how fast can we help the American public understand that this is an all-out assault on the things that literally make their life livable.”
DOGE (which poet Raymond Nat Turner memorably nicknamed the Department Of Grifter Enrichment) serves several purposes at once for the administration. It punishes political enemies and attacks agencies that Musk and Trump are ideologically opposed to; it attacks agencies that are investigating or regulating Musk personally; and it opens the door to privatization in industries that Musk and his allies might profit from. A group of legislators, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR), sent a letter to Musk that reads, in part: “Given the scale of your power to carry out sweeping administrative policies and your vast personal financial interests, the American people deserve to know how you stand to profit from your role in the Trump administration.”
DOGE also generally creates chaos, which destroys trust in the idea of government at all. It’s the latest iteration of what historian and writer Thomas Frank called “the wrecking crew,” in his book of the same name: nominating people ideologically opposed to an agency to run the agency, or people ideologically opposed to the very idea of good government. Geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls it the anti-state state: politicians who win state power for themselves by bashing the state and promising to shrink it.
Historian Quinn
Slobodian explained this moment as “the convergence of three strains of
politics that have never simultaneously been this proximate to power. Those
projects come from different but related places: the Wall Street – Silicon Valley
nexus of distressed debt and startup culture; anti – New Deal conservative think
tanks; and the extremely online world of anarchocapitalism and right-wing
accelerationism.” Those three strains have overlapping but distinct interests,
and Musk and Trump vacillate among them.
But those strains have one thing in common: opposition to the very existence of what remains of the welfare state. As Liza Featherstone pointed out at The New Republic, the focus on popular programs is not a mistake, but the point. “By going after the most popular government programs, they are thinking long-term, planning for a world where no one defends government agencies because these agencies don’t do anything that we value,” she wrote. “As we protest this vandalism, we need to remember that [Musk] aims to build a future in which we have nothing left to defend.”
The incompetence and general mess of Musk’s crew is at once a feature of their plans and also something that makes it possible to undermine them. Their public missteps — having to rehire people they fired, sharing wildly inaccurate information, getting access to classified and personal data and bragging about it — are making people angry, and even beginning to scare Republicans. They might even be shooting themselves in the foot — one of the targets of cuts at the National Science Foundation could be research on self-driving cars, something Musk is heavily invested in. (Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, on the other hand, thinks they’re “woke DEI.”)
The cuts are just beginning to get through to politicians, let alone the general public, but some Republican legislators are making noise — thus far, anonymously—in the press. One GOP senator told The Hill, “Wrong, wrong, wrong. Get [Musk] out of the White House. Get him out, the sooner the better.” The senator added: “Every day that he’s there, he seems more destructive.” Federal workers and other constituents are calling them nonstop, demanding answers, and programs in their districts are getting axed. Susan Collins (R-ME) is one of the few who has put her name to her words, saying, “There’s no doubt that the president appears to have empowered Elon Musk to go far beyond what I think is appropriate.”
The funding freeze and cuts at NIH, Wolfson said, are “having a critical impact on the healthcare infrastructure of this country. These cuts will kill people.” At the Philly protest, Matthew Buckley, an associate physics professor at Rutgers-New Brunswick and chair of the full-time faculty union’s legislative committee, told reporters, “I don’t know what people voted for last November. I’m pretty sure they didn’t vote to cut cancer research, and that is what’s going on.”
“We need to build out a strategy that protects workers from layoffs in the federal government,” Wolfson said, “but also recognize that this is not only about layoffs, it’s also about the health of every single American.”
The actions February 19 were just one small step in the process, but they were also a demonstration that Trump and Musk will not be able to gut the government without a fight.
Tackling popular programs may have been part of their strategy, but it was always a gamble, a calculated risk that Americans were too busy and too exhausted and would be too shocked to fight back. Montes, Wolfson and Dols and their thousands of colleagues are proving them wrong, but they will need help in order to succeed.
“Our challenge is to help the public understand that before we’re not interested in an ‘I told you so’ in two years, we want people to understand it now as it’s happening, so that we can still stop them,” Dols said.
Public sector unions can lead that charge, the workers I spoke to agreed. This is, Dols noted, an expansion of “bargaining for the common good,” a strategy that began with the Chicago Teachers Union and expanded through public schools into higher ed, in unions like Wolfson’s home local at Rutgers University, where the union fought austerity measures and layoffs during the Covid lockdown.
During a period of attacks on public workers in the states and the courts, some of those unions learned to turn the attacks back on their opponents, building community alliances and arguing that it was they, not politicians, who spoke for the public, who had the people’s best interests at heart.
The labor movement, Dols said, has “an opportunity to help prove to the real political establishment wing of the Democratic Party, that if they actually are serious about defending democracy and resolving this constitutional crisis, that they’re actually going to have to follow the lead of the labor movement.”
The federal sector can learn from the rest of the public sector, and the labor movement can build on the Labor for Higher Ed alliance — which includes the American Association of University Professors, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the American Federation of Teachers, the Communications Workers of America, the National Education Association, the United Auto Workers, the Office and Professional Employees International Union, and the United Electrical workers — and expand on this week’s actions.
Labor for Higher Ed has an event planned for Washington, D.C., on February 25. Around the country, its members will be calling on legislators to do something.
“I expect growing militancy out of the sector to respond to this and other threats,” Wolfson said.
Montes, meanwhile, is fighting to get her job back: “I want to work. So many people say that young people are lazy, especially Hispanic [young people]. I want to do hard work.” She’s filed an appeal, though she doesn’t have a lot of faith in that process. “I know that I can’t just sit here and do nothing,” she said.
Montes wants those other federal workers to see and to know that they aren’t alone, so she’s organizing as much as she can, reaching out to other fired workers and staying active.
“Two of our employees that were terminated just got reinstated because they had been there for several years,” she said, which was proof that their efforts could work. But, she told me, as she’d said at the Wednesday action, “I think it’s crazy that I have to fight for my right to serve the American people.”
Sarah Jaffe is a writer and reporter living in New Orleans and on the road. She is the author of Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion To Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone; Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, and her latest book is From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, all from Bold Type Books. Her journalism covers the politics of power, from the workplace to the streets, and her writing has been published in The Nation, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and many other outlets. She is a columnist at The Progressive and In These Times. She also co-hosts the Belabored podcast, with Michelle Chen, covering today’s labor movement, and Heart Reacts, with Craig Gent, an advice podcast for the collapse of late capitalism. Sarah has been a waitress, a bicycle mechanic, and a social media consultant, cleaned up trash and scooped ice cream and explained Soviet communism to middle schoolers. Journalism pays better than some of these. You can follow her on Twitter @sarahljaffe.
