If Trump Crushes Federal Workers, We’re All Next

[Republished from The Nation]

“I’m a federal worker, and I feel like a canary in the coal mine right now—because what they’re doing to us is going to happen to the entire American public.” That’s how Chris Dols, who works for the US Army Corps of Engineers and is the president of a local chapter of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, began his video response to Elon Musk’s instantly infamous Oval Office press conference last week.

Dols is right: Musk’s attacks on federal employees and their unions aren’t just a threat to the specific workers in his current line of fire. They pose an unparalleled danger to every single American.

Trump’s mission is simple: to exert authoritarian control over all branches of the federal government. To do that, he can’t merely fire the people at the top of government agencies. He needs workers at all levels of government who will put his wishes ahead of everything else, including the law. And to do that, he has to break the back of the federal employee labor movement.

That’s why Trump has unleashed Musk to take a wrecking ball to piece after piece of the government under the guise of trying to increase efficiency. The organized power of federal workers is the main obstacle to MAGA’s looting of public services and consolidation of authoritarian rule. The stronger they are, the harder it is for Trump to fully impose his agenda on American society.

Just as ominously, Trump and Musk are using these attacks to wage an ideological assault on the very principle of public services. Dols’s response to Musk expressed this clearly: “Everything public is under attack. The entire public sphere is under attack by a handful of billionaires behind Donald Trump.… Are you trying to do this for the American people, or are you trying to do this for your own gain? I get the feeling you didn’t become the richest person in the world by looking out for others.”

Nobody else is as well positioned as federal workers to halt this administration’s reactionary ambitions. Democratic leaders seem mostly interested in convincing their base that there’s nothing they can do. And while it’s still possible that the courts may pause or rein in some of Trump’s most egregious legal violations, we shouldn’t expect the Supreme Court, a third of which Trump appointed, to check his conduct ...