Federal Workers Rise up Against Musk, Trump and Drastic Cuts

Naturally, that’s placed it in the crosshairs of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which has so far functioned like a private hit squad, moving in and out of various government offices in what Reuters, based on the analysis of two Republican experts, called ​“an ideological assault on federal agencies long hated by conservatives.”

Dols, a founding member of a new network of federal workers organizing to counter the attacks from President Donald Trump and Musk, thought the targeting of CFPB clarified what Musk and Trump’s real agenda is.

“[The CFPB] is the protection for consumers against fraud,” he said. ​“The grifters went after the anti-grifting agency.” If Trump and Musk really cared about cutting waste and fraud and improving the lives of working people, he noted, they’d be strengthening and expanding the CFPB’s reach, rather than slashing it.

Lauren, a worker with the Bureau of Land Management who did not want to give her last name for fear of being targeted, noted that while Musk is bragging about returning the CFPB’s budget ​“to the taxpayers,” that’s pennies compared to the $21 billion the CFPB has returned to Americans who’d been ripped off by financial institutions since its inception in 2011. 

“I don’t know if people have already forgotten how devastating that financial crisis was and how many lives it upended,” she said.

Dols, Lauren and the other members of the Federal Unionists Network (FUN) have been preparing for Trump’s assault on the public workforce and swung into action in the months since his election. (All of the workers I spoke to for this article provided their job title and union membership for ID purposes only and stressed they are only speaking in a personal capacity, not on behalf of their employer or their union.) 

Those workers are engineers like Dols — who works at the Army Corps of Engineers as a dredging expert and is president of Local 98 of International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) — but also healthcare providers, legal experts, and other professionals who, together, make up a federal workforce of more than two million now under threat of removal by an administration bent on wreaking havoc on the very idea that government can improve the lives of its citizens. They’ve called for a day of action on February 19, and more broadly, for federal workers and anyone who wants to save public services to step up and learn to organize.

“We have a ton to learn from all the people who are going to come in,” Dols said. ​“Everybody needs to become an organizer right now.”

In addition to opposing DOGE’s roving hits, the FUN has focused on Trump’s offer to buy out federal workers. The offer has Musk’s fingerprints all over it — the email making the original buyout offer was titled ​“Fork in the Road,” the same title Musk used in a similar email to Twitter employees when he acquired the social networking site — and a number of unions have filed multiple lawsuits against the buyout. But a judge removed a freeze placed on the offer while the lawsuits proceeded on Wednesday, at least temporarily allowing it to go forward. (In These Times reached out to Musk Friday with questions about this article and have not yet received a response.)

Whether it is legally halted or not, Dols pointed out, the buyout has fallen short of the administration’s hopes. Something like 3% of the workforce has reportedly accepted the buyout — as Dols noted, in a given year, the turnover due to retirement or normal resignation is closer to 5%. ​“Federal workers obviously don’t trust it, they feel this is an attack. This is a scam.” The court’s decision to let the buyout proceed, he said, ​“should show us that it’s going to be up to organized labor to wage the fight and not to trust the courts.”

“They know they’re creating a crisis. It’s intentional,” Dols said. ​“They think they can manage the crisis. They wouldn’t create it if they didn’t think they could manage it. Our job is to make it unmanageable.”

“Many of these things that we’re seeing from this administration are designed to strike fear into people,” Colin Smalley, also with the Army Corps of Engineers and president of Local 777 of IFPTE, told me. ​“And a lot of folks out there have been building community in anticipation of this. They’ve been building a place to turn to, whether that’s organized labor or whether it’s the folks that you do a community garden with or your church or whatever it is that you can turn to be with other people and accomplish something together. To me, that’s the work that beats this division and chaos.”

Smalley, like Dols, began organizing federal workers within and beyond his union a few years ago, and the two of them ran on a joint ticket for IFPTE leadership in 2024, highlighting the danger that a potential Trump victory posed to the federal workforce. While the Trump/​Musk chaos is unprecedented in recent history, he said, their tactics are recognizable: ​“They use some of the same tactics as traditional union busting tactics in the private sector, that these so-called union avoidance firms preach,” he said. ​“One of the reasons we knew it was going to be bad is because things have been getting bad before January 20. They were getting bad before November. Things have been getting bad for working people for a long time.”

Being prepared for a Trump return was a form of inoculation, Dols added. ​“You talk about what might happen so that people are prepared for it so that when they actually encounter it, it’s not the first time that it’s happening to them, and it’s not totally disorienting.”

The network now known as FUN grew out of a campaign to confirm former President Joe Biden’s nominees to the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA, the agency which manages labor relations for the federal workforce), and evolved into a grassroots rank-and-file network across unions and agencies across the country. 

Mark Smith, an occupational therapist and health educator with the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) in San Francisco, as well as president of National Federation of Federal Employees Local 1, explained, ​“We really wanted a way to connect with each other and learn from each other and build a bit more of a fighting labor movement in the federal sector, to defend the public sector and public services more broadly from just the 40 year assault on public services in this country.”

The challenge for organized labor in this moment, Dols said, is to move away from a mobilization strategy — bring people to a rally, wave some placards, and go home — to ​“an actual mass participation organizing model.” That means building, day by day, bigger, stronger unions, adding new members and training the ones that exist. ​“We need orders of magnitude more people learning how to take action and organize action and compel their coworkers into action. That’s the only way we’re going to have the forces in place that can win these arguments, let alone win elections.”

Part of their strategy, he added, is being willing to challenge the Democrats on their failures — something that much of the labor movement has been unwilling to do, and if it has, it’s often been to cozy up to Trump instead. Those early campaigns didn’t succeed — those Biden nominees were never, in fact, confirmed, nor did Dols and Smalley win national leadership — but each attempt brought in new members and taught them more about what federal workers wanted and needed. 

The network now known as the FUN was small, compared to the massive federal workforce, but it was in the right place when Trump was announced the winner in November, and ready to fight. 

“People were looking for where to go to resist what was coming,” Dols said. ​“We’re in the middle of this massive growth spurt.”

Their upcoming day of action on February 19 is in some ways a structure test, to see the breadth of that growth in action. Under the slogan ​“SOS, Save Our Services,” they are at once making a distress call to the broader public, and providing a visible pole of attraction for people to join. That call has already been working — ​“The federal workforce is awakening,” Smith said — as workers rush to join the various federal unions. (The entire federal sector is open shop, meaning workers don’t have to be members of the union to receive the benefits of its collective bargaining.)

“I’ve had more people sign up for the union in the last week than in six months previously. As we say in the labor movement” Smith said, ​“a bad boss is the best organizer.”

To Smalley, it’s important to show the country the real work that federal employees do, to counter Musk’s railing about ​“unelected” bureaucracy. ​“The Right now loves to call us unelected bureaucrats. The idea is that these unelected bureaucrats are somehow making decisions that are unaccountable to the public when the reality couldn’t be further from the truth for most federal workers.” (Musk, of course, was also not elected by anyone.)

Many people, those who may have voted for Trump and believed in his promises to cut government waste, but also those who broadly oppose his policies, don’t really know what the federal workforce looks like, where it’s located, or the variety of jobs it contains. But federal workers are all over the country, in every community, in cities and on rural lands. The government, Smalley said, ​“looks like books in our libraries. It looks like trees in our parks. It looks like people getting the healthcare that they need, and folks that have contributed to their communities for a full life aren’t destitute and suffering on the street. These guys are trying to take a torch to the entire concept that we should care about each other as humans.”

Lauren, for instance, works for the Department of the Interior in New Mexico. ​“The majority of the American public does not even know about the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), what we do and the extent to which we operate,” she said. ​“It is a huge contribution to economic development, but also in terms of what we’re addressing and facing with climate change, environmental justice, we’re really at that nexus for those issues.” And during the last Trump administration, they brought the hatchet down on BLM headquarters, forcing a relocation to Colorado from D.C., and dispersed others around the country. Many employees left their jobs rather than move, and Trump has pointed to this strategy as something he’d like to replicate this time around.

MT Snyder, meanwhile, another FUN member, is a field examiner with the National Labor Relations Board in San Francisco. Her day-to-day is conducting union representation elections and investigating unfair labor practice charges for private sector workers. 

“I drive all over Northern California to any facility where there’s going to be a union election and manually conduct these elections, secret ballot elections using paper ballots and a cardboard box.” She studied labor relations in graduate school and wanted to dedicate her life to supporting workers’ right to organize.

This is true of many federal employees, Smith said. ​“This administration has kind of shot itself in the foot multiple times already with the emails they’re sending to two million federal employees saying that you should consider a high productivity job in the private sector and get away from your low productivity job in the public sector,” he said. The physicians and nurses and other healthcare professionals at the VHA, he said, could work anywhere, but chose public service, and telling them that they are ​“low productivity” has only fired them up. 

Those VHA workers are all over the country: they are psychologists, social workers, speech therapists, chaplains, health scientists, researchers, pharmacists, and doctors and nurses. ​“They come for the mission of serving veterans, and then also avoiding much of the moral injury that I think happens in the private sector where you’re not able to deliver the care that you would want to be able to because people can’t pay or the insurance company doesn’t want to pay.”

Beyond the VHA, the union Smith belongs to, the NFFE, represents workers in the forest service, including the kinds of wildland firefighters that have been desperately needed to fight the recent wildfires in Southern California. There are National Park Service workers who might lose their seasonal jobs with Trump’s hiring freeze, park rangers who, Lauren said, ​“are living in trailers because they can’t afford housing in the communities that they serve.”

“This idea that we’re overpaid and not doing our jobs and are only located in D.C. is just patently false,” she said. ​“They’re acting like our agencies are overfunded and inefficient, but we’re basically accomplishing our missions on drastically reduced budgets.”

The IFPTE, Smalley said, represents workers like him, at the Army Corps of Engineers, who do things like prevent flooding and help with disaster recovery — again, deeply necessary work after this year’s violent storms — and ecosystem restoration.

“We represent the scientists and engineers as well as the folks that work on the business end of things with the money and the economists and planners. But we also have equipment mechanics, lock and dam operators, crane operators. There’s a tugboat crew that we represent on the Great Lakes.”

And those people, Snyder added, those rank-and-file workers across a wide array of industries, job titles, unions and states, are fighting to keep providing those services — and fighting for the idea of government as something that provides for people at all. 

“My office is full of attorneys who could double their income by moving to the private sector,” Snyder said. ​“I think that Musk and this administration don’t understand how much public servants care about the work that they do. And we’ll fight to make sure that the public will continue to benefit from our services.”

The battle to save public services predates Trump and his alliance with Musk. ​“Outsourcing and privatization has been increasing exponentially for more than a decade, including under both Democrat and Republican appointees,” Smith said. The Supreme Court’s decision in Janus v. AFSCME (2018) made the rest of the public sector open shop, a move that built on decades of demonizing public employees, from teachers to social workers, as greedy leeches draining the pockets of ordinary working people. 

In 2010, a wave of Republican governors like former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker attempted to crush public workers’ unions on the state level, and Trump and Musk are out to do the same on the federal level. That effort has led to some overheated, verging-on-unhinged rhetoric from the Right. Russ Vought, Trump’s choice to run the Office of Management and Budget, has said ​“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.” (Not to be outdone, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said during his failed presidential campaign that he would ​“start slitting throats” in the federal bureaucracy.)

Democrats, meanwhile, rarely succeed in undoing these attacks. ​“When the Democrats are in power, it tends to be that everything is about bipartisanship and compromise. And so rather than making strides forward, we’re making small strides back,” Smalley said. ​“Whereas in Republican administrations, generally we’re getting thrown as far back as they possibly can, and we’re in a defensive mode.” Nearly every worker I spoke with mentioned chronic underfunding at their agencies, chronic pressure to do more with less.

The attacks on the federal sector are just the beginning, Lauren noted. ​“They’re not going to stop with us.” The public sector is, after all, still one of the few bastions of good employment — while it pays less than private sector work, the stability, protections, and sense of mission compensate, or at least, they have in the past. 

“We are the proof to the American working class that there is a better way. You don’t have to be peeing in a bottle in the back of an Amazon van or working 80 hours a week,” Smalley said. ​“Those of us who work in government, a lot of us came specifically for the better working conditions. And the people like Elon Musk are trying to destroy that status quo so that they can gaslight all of America into forgetting that there’s a better way.”

If they succeed, there will be a trickle-down effect on the rest of the country, just not the one that Republicans have long promised. Rather than money, it’ll be shoddy working conditions that spread. Trump has already fired members of the NLRB and the FLRA, preventing those authorities from doing their jobs, despite the law stating that those members can only be removed ​“for neglect of duty or malfeasance in office, but for no other cause.” Employers can essentially flout the law, secure in the knowledge that the board can’t act to stop them.

Despite all the shock and awe, Snyder said, workers are digging in, and her union’s members are more engaged than ever. ​“We’re having emergency meetings, we are coming up with ideas, we’re making our own pins, making our own slogans. Members of my local know that this fight is dire. The stakes are incredibly high.”

The incursions by DOGE have been shocking, Smalley noted, and reach well beyond the employees at places like the CFPB. ​“They are attempting to corporatize every square inch of the federal government.” Most notably, DOGE has accessed the Treasury payments system, and databases which contain, according to one Associated Press article, ​“information about individual and business taxes, medical records, Social Security payments and numbers, and government payments, as well as a long list of other personal data, such as birthdates, home addresses and phone numbers, military records and disability information.”

The process is chaotic, sloppy, and while the cruelty is, as so many have noted for years, the point, it is also true that it is not a well thought out process. ​“I work in the Department of Defense, and we’ve seen the phrase ​‘national security’ applied at least three different ways,” Smalley said, to exempt and then un-exempt workers from freezes, cuts, buyouts and layoffs. 

Beyond the cruelty, the economic impact of the massive layoffs that the administration is considering would be massive. The demonization of public sector workers tends to ignore the fact that decently paid public employees do in fact pay taxes, shop in local stores and online, and contribute to the stability of their communities. If they lose jobs en masse, there will be ripple effects in local economies.

The fight is, at the end of the day, about the very nature of government, Smalley said. ​“The way that coming together as a community has been organized in this country is through government. Government is not some abstraction, some monolithic thing. It’s people in our community serving each other.”

To beat Trump and Musk at their own game, Dols said, the fightback will have to be broader than one union or one sector, even one as massive as the federal sector. 

“All the unions that are keeping their head down hoping that they don’t come after them [should know] they’re coming after everybody. The sooner you stand up with each other, the better,” he said. ​“You make the argument that this is an attack on the public by the billionaires. So which side are you on?”

The February 19 day of action is an opportunity to pick a side, and to demonstrate it. One part of it will be online — the FUN is asking people to post pictures of themselves wearing red, white and blue and describing the services they provide, if they’re a federal worker, or how they benefit from those services if they’re not. They should get together in person, to take photos but also to be seen in public, to invite others to join. They’re also calling in-person rallies, including at Tesla stores all across the country, Snyder said.

“This is about showing each other that we can be courageous together,” Smalley said, ​“and that in the face of the attempts to make us afraid and to make us divided and to make us feel hopeless, that we can turn all of those narratives with something as simple as coming together to remind ourselves why we do our jobs, why we come to work, no matter where that work is.”

Supporters can join those events, but it’s also important, Smith said, for regular people to be calling their members of Congress — Democrat or Republican — and demand that the attacks on public servants stop. If they’re union members in a different sector, they can call on their union to support the federal workers’ efforts.

It is a moment, the workers all stressed, to be building bridges rather than demanding ideological purity. As the effects of Trump’s cuts and attacks are felt, Smalley said, ​“People who have traditionally thought that they didn’t have much in common with working class people, maybe they don’t identify as part of the working class, they’re going to be affected, and they’re going to need that same community that we’re building right now, and we’re going to be here ready to work with them.”

At the same time, Dols stressed, it is a moment for political education, for focusing on the billionaires and others who are materially benefiting from Trumpism. 

“They are rich because we are poor,” he said. ​“And if they want to say let ​‘er rip so that the economy booms, it’s just going to exacerbate all of the contradictions that gave rise to all of the regulations that are in place. The establishment is forgetting that the labor protections enforced by the NLRB, and the regulations that are enforced by various regulatory agencies, were all put in place to stabilize the system because the system is crisis prone.”

This requires, again, organizing beyond a few social media snaps and reposts. The Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) is starting a project focusing on organizing federal workers who don’t already have a union, Dols said, and despite the stifling of the various labor boards, workers can still behave like a union whether or not they’re legally recognized. As for FUN, ​“We’re going to do everything we can to maximize our surface area, create opportunities for people to come in and take ownership over it,” Dols said.

They want to build a democratic mass organization out of the network, and to do that, they need to organize a lot of new members.

The fight ahead is going to be a marathon, not a sprint — a phrase well beyond cliché at this point, but it’s one worth remembering in this moment. ​“Some of us who are inclined to sprint — and God knows I’m inclined to sprint — have to make sure we’re making strategic choices to scale up in a way that’s sustainable because part of their crisis plan is to burn us out,” Dols continued. 

“Those of us who are already in the trenches need to pace ourselves in a way that we can survive this long run and in the process, enlist and train as many other people to walk and then to jog and then to run alongside us,” he said. 

“This isn’t going to be solved by a handful of really clever organizers. It’s going to be solved by an army of organizers mobilizing the broader public to make this crisis unmanageable for ​‘em.”