Above photo: John Angelillo/UPI/REX/Shutterstock.
Trump and DOGE’s attempts to gut the federal workforce and public sectors have implications for the entire working class.
An effective fight back will have to challenge labor law, unite with social movements, and have no illusions in the courts or the Democrats.
Despite contradictions in the U.S. regime and emerging opposition, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are moving forward with their goal of gutting the federal workforce and attacking public sector unions. Both their method of carrying out the attacks and the impact so far have been an absolute shitshow, with many attacks quickly being halted by interventions from the courts, leading to changes by the day. It is clear though that the Trump administration and Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are hellbent on gutting services that working communities rely on, destroying tens of thousands of jobs in the process.
Some of the targets have been workers on probationary status (which includes newly hired federal workers as well as highly experienced federal workers who have recently taken on a new role in the government). However, a judge quickly intervened, determining that the mass firing was illegal and that these workers must be rehired. In fact, the courts have increasingly been challenging Trump’s overreach on all fronts, and many unions have been responsible for the lawsuits challenging the administration’s attacks. Additionally, there have been mobilizations across the country led by federal workers.
The current stage of the administration’s attacks may be a stress test. The intentional overreach allows them to feel out where the attacks will be challenged most, and from there pursue more tactical attacks that have a better shot at succeeding.
The Larger Agenda
The intentions behind these attacks are political and economic. Trump and sectors of the Far Right have made no secret that they aim to strengthen the power of the executive branch of the U.S. government to carry out an agenda of mass deportations, privatization and cuts to social services, and a reorganization of U.S. imperialism. The byzantine complexities of the federal bureaucracy that runs whole day to day operations of U.S. society represent a real obstacle to this agenda.
The attempt by Trump and the billionaires around him (most notably Musk) to privatize services and impose austerity through mass layoffs is a direct attack on the working class. Departments won through class struggle to regulate some of the most egregious ills of the capitalist state are especially at risk, such as the Department of Education, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Labor Relations Board.
Along with these mass firings of federal workers, another layer of the attacks on the public sector is the attack on workers employed by state governments. While the administration does not have the ability to fire these workers, Trump is attempting to freeze federal funding to state governments used for public sector jobs. This is in part so that Trump can strong-arm and punish states that try to oppose him, but it also has an impact on the public sector jobs — and large non-profit industry — that rely on federal funds.
It must be noted that the attack on public sector workers has implications for the entire working class given that the public sector is the most unionized layer of the U.S. working class, with more than five times the unionization rate of the private sector. Additionally, these attacks disproportionately harm the Black working class who make up a significant proportion of the federal workforce.
It is impossible to imagine the consequences of these attacks both in terms of what they would mean for the character of U.S. society, and the concrete impact they will have on people’s lives. What is clear is that thousands upon thousands of lives are being uprooted in just the first weeks of these attacks.
Democrats Use Trump as a Cover for Cuts
While the Trump administration is attacking public sector workers, many Democrats have been leading the attacks on these workers locally, claiming they are preemptively laying workers off and attacking their living standards. Los Angeles offers an example of this as a Democrat-run city in a Democratic state where public sector unions are preparing to go on strike.
SEIU 721, a public sector union in LA County representing 55,000 workers, published the LA County Board of Supervisors CEO’s office report. The Board of Supervisors is controlled by the Democratic Party — every official except one is a Democrat. And yet, they are stating that because of the threat of Trump, they will not match cost of living increases. A month ago University of California workers ASCFME Local 3299 representing 37,000 workers went on strike across the state to protest the attacks on their cost of living. According to the union, the university has used intimidation tactics and threatened workers for protesting ahead of the strike. California has been used by the Democrats to present as an opposition to Trump.
The trickery of the Democrats can also be seen in their role in social movements. Sanctuary city legislation has been passed in cities across the state, yet Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids continue while local politicians remain silent. It has only been through community organization that ICE has been thwarted.
The Democrats locally and across the country at best sit on their hands while public sector workers are attacked. But, as has been the case for decades, like in LA County, they are the orchestrators of the attacks on workers’ living standards. SEIU 721 members’ dues have gone towards the LA County Board of Supervisors. We were encouraged to get them elected, assisting the same politicians in office who claim there’s no money for workers, while giving billions to subcontracted agencies and spending hundreds of millions to build themselves a skyscraper.
The co-optive (at best) role of the Democrats shows that it is necessary for our unions to cut ties with this party which has no interest in seriously fighting for the workers under attack from the Far Right. We cannot allow them to take the outrage at these attacks and use them to strengthen their capitalist party. The working class needs its own political party to organize in our interests and strengthen our ability to take on the capitalists and their parties.
For a Militant Fight Against the Attacks
While the broader implications of these attacks are still unclear, one thing is certain: This is an egregious attack on the U.S. working class based on nakedly authoritarian and oligarchic aspirations of the current administration and the capitalists it serves. It is essential that public sector unions mobilize their members and use their labor power to confront these attacks. This will require confronting existing anti-worker laws which prohibit federal workers from going on strike. The legal constraints on how federal workers can fight back should incentivize workers fighting Trump to also take up a larger struggle against the anti-worker nature of the U.S. state which Trump is using to advance his agenda.
Workers cannot rely on the structures of checks and balances set up by a “bourgeois democracy” (a system designed by and for the capitalist class). After all, even if the courts are currently doing an effective job at challenging Trump’s worst attacks, Trump is increasingly vowing to just ignore the authority of the courts. And as we have written before, the Supreme Court is the exact opposite of democracy. To the extent that structures of checks and balances might be roadblocks in Trump’s agenda, their aim is to preserve a system which was already not on the side of the workers under attack and which has constantly sought to limit our ability to organize with our collective power, especially when we use that power in the form of strikes, pickets, and other weapons that show how we as workers make everything run.
There is an opportunity to fight, especially because the Trump administration is not attacking from a position of strength. Reports of a heated cabinet meeting fight between Elon Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio shows that the Right is divided over how far to go in slashing the federal workforce, even if they are in agreement over the general idea of privatizing more services and weakening the power of workers. Many of the attacks are also highly unpopular, like cuts to social security and Medicaid and the firing of tens of thousands of workers at the department of Veterans Affairs (the latter representing veterans who make up an important sector of Trump’s base).
These attacks are unprecedented, so our opposition to them also has to be unprecedented. Public sector unions should be calling assemblies for workers to meet and discuss how to fight back. Importantly, these cannot just be spaces where union bureaucrats set an agenda in advance and tell workers how they can get plugged into campaigns or more effectively talk to their coworkers. The workers themselves should be using meetings to discuss demands and what actions to take to resist these attacks, as well as how they can build unity with other sectors under attack like immigrants and the movement for Palestine.
This is not a far-fetched idea. It was at the largest public university in the country, the University of California, that academic workers organized in the UAW went on strike against repression of the movement for Palestine. In New Jersey, the SEIU has backed legislation to make the state a sanctuary state for immigrants and mobilized members at protests against ICE detention. The SEIU rank and file across the country has a recent history of organizing their union to fight for the oppressed with campaigns like SEIU Drop the Cops, the effort by rank-and-file members to disaffiliate law enforcement from the union, and Purple Up for Palestine, a pro-Palestine rank-and-file effort.
We also cannot organize based on illusions in supposed American democracy. Yes, Trump is acting as an authoritarian, but it is because of the nature of the American system and the class interests the presidency serves that he is able to attempt such anti-democratic maneuvers. This understanding is essential to our ability to fight back effectively. And by ditching illusions in American exceptionalism, we can fight with an internationalist perspective that allows us to draw from struggles against austerity in other countries. For example, the presidency of Javier Milei in Argentina is serving as a model for cuts that DOGE is attempting to carry out. But Milei’s attacks have not gone unchallenged, and workers in the United States are kneecapping ourselves if we don’t look to the resistance in Argentina as a model for our own fight back. And there are many other examples to learn from internationally, from South Korea to Serbia.
The attempts by Trump and DOGE to gut the federal workforce and public sectors has implications for the entire U.S. working class. An effective fight back will have to challenge labor law, unite with social movements, and have no illusions in the Democratic Party or the structures of the U.S. state.