By JAMES MARKIN
The assault from the Trump administration against federal workers has been coming thick and fast ever since his inauguration in January. A full list of attacks would be too long to fit in this article, so here are some highlights.
First, the administration sent out the now infamous “Fork in the Road” email, which offered federal employees who quit in February a paycheck through September, clearly based on Elon Musk’s similar efforts to clear house at Twitter. When few federal workers accepted this dubious offer, the government began to lay off probationary employees in huge numbers. Then, in early March, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security unilaterally threw out the contract of AFGE (American Federation of Government Employees) unionized workers at the Transportation Security Administration, only one year in. The justification? It’s the same warmed-over union-busting material about how unions prevent meritocracy that every anti-labor law firm in the country cooks up when their client’s workforce might potentially organize.
More recently, Trump signed an executive order proclaiming that from now on, a large list of federal departments would no longer recognize or bargain with unions that represent their workers. This list includes many of the critical departments of state, including the Department of Defense (DOD), Veterans Affairs (VA), State Department, Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Energy, ICE, and so on. So how did Trump justify throwing out all these union contracts? His Executive Order states that these unions and their contracts are a danger to national security. Notably, the EO makes clear that police unions will be untouched by this assault.
Workers’ Voice spoke to an anonymous worker at the VA, “R,” who pointed out that this political picking and choosing of whom to attack and whom to leave alone is consistent in Trump’s approach. She also pointed out that while the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties faced deep cuts, ICE did not.
Indeed, Trump’s attack goes further, causing federal employees to be afraid that they might be fired for their political beliefs. According to R, “There is a lot of talk and fear about people being targeted for their political beliefs or for things they’ve said. This has understandably created paranoia.” This climate extends to service delivery, as federal departments strip away any acknowledgement of gender and racial minorities out of fear of retaliatory cuts.
R says that this causes many federal departments to adopt a “two-faced” approach. “One day we are all about supporting LGBTQ veterans. Our VAs used to fly the LGBTQ flag on campus. Then Trump comes into office and we have scrubbed every single word related to LGBTQ veterans from every website, sign, and email. The total erasure is chilling.”
According to R, workers are even afraid that they are being surveilled by their employer. R confirms that she has “been told by our leadership that it is possible that our Microsoft Teams meetings are being recorded without our knowledge and that our chats are being monitored.” This, of course, leads to further paranoia. As R puts it, “When odd things come up, people get scared; when we notice new software on our government laptops that maybe wasn’t there before, people share rumors about what it is or how it got there. How true any of these rumors are is difficult to say.”
These actions reveal the broader two-fold agenda of the Trump administration—first, an attack on public services will cause these services to run poorly, making the case for further privatization. R points out, “You can’t just gut an entire office or agency and not anticipate an enormous domino effect. There is a lot of interdependence. At the VA, how well we care for a veteran depends wholly on how well we can coordinate care across departments like mental health, housing/HUD, substance abuse services—the list goes on. You take out one and the whole structure crumbles.”
Indeed, the loss of some critical employees makes the work of federal departments that much harder. According to R, “it’s hard to really explain how impactful that loss of knowledge or expertise can be on the work that we do. Administrative jobs alone require so much specific knowledge of our agency that is learned over years. You lose them and realize that not even your supervisor knows what they know. So, in that sense no one is really replaceable. Even before the RIF, federal workers were already feeling their teams were short staffed.”
Beyond that, the cloud of uncertainty created by Trump’s attacks also degrades the effectiveness of employees’ work. R states, “It is really difficult to focus at work when you know you might be losing your job very soon. It is difficult to do your best work on projects that you know might collapse in the near future. Every federal employee I talk to is now struggling with panic, anxiety, and even depression.” Then, of course, there are the famous “Explain five things you did this week” emails, which R is required to complete as a VA employee, wasting even more time.
The second part of Trump’s agenda is a little more obvious; he wants nothing less than the destruction of the current union bargaining system. If contracts can be thrown out unilaterally by Trump, what is to stop any employer from doing so? If contracts aren’t worth the paper they are printed on, then the entire modern approach of “business unionism,” which has dominated organized labor since the 1950s (whereby unions agree to not rock the boat with employers in order to get the best sweet-heart contracts possible), seems entirely undone. While federal workers might face this onslaught now, there is little doubt that it will come to the rest of the public sector, and then the private sector, sooner rather than later.
So what is to be done? Workers need to show that their real power lies not in contracts or courthouses, but in their ability to fight back together as a union, and even go on strike. Some of this work is already underway. According to R, even though DOGE and Trump have tried to “create a working environment where people will feel fearful and rat each other out, so far, they have only succeeded at creating the opposite. People are really coming together and supporting each other right now.”
She continued that as part of this backlash, “there has been an enormous mobilization of federal workers against DOGE and Trump. We are all mad. We all feel disrespected. That shared experience makes us want to stand up for each other. There is a lot of work to be done still in mobilizing federal employees, getting them to join and strengthen their unions, and organize. The Federal Unionists Network (FUN) is helping to build solidarity across the federal sector and teach federal workers how to build movements. It’s also a place our allies can join to support us.”
While the current struggle is, as R puts it, a very uphill battle, it is one that all workers, public or private sector, have investment in. The labor movement in this country has for a long time come to rely on the protections of labor law. With Trump’s complete flouting of these laws, this approach seems doomed. This ultimately requires the union movement to re-learn the old methods of mass struggle, like solidarity and sit-down strikes, or perish out of failure to adapt.
The fight to defend AFGE must be the fight of all organized labor and its supporters, using all the tools and tactics that flow from labor’s power at the point of production. In the midst of this battle to defend our rights to union contracts, it will become clear that we also need a workers’ party, which can mobilize all working people in the streets to fight back on every front against the attacks of the capitalist class.
