Stand with Federal Workers

Last week more than 15,000 federal workers were abruptly fired from their jobs. In Department of Labor jargon, this would be called a “mass layoff event” and if it were occurring in any other organization would trigger a host of “rapid response” actions designed to minimize the financial impact on workers, their families, and the communities where they live. But there will be no rapid response for laid-off civil servants, just promises from the administration to add to their numbers.

This is only the beginning of what will be a steady war on workers over the next several years and on the laws and institutions that protect them from arbitrary power. Under the guise of attacking federal waste, DEI, and “woke ideology”, the Trump-Musk regime is laying the groundwork for gutting worker rights. Authoritarian regimes have no place for an independent labor movement, even as they pretend to champion workers.

Losing a job is always hard, but mass layoffs—the dismissal of 50 or more workers from a single organization over a short period of time—are particularly traumatic for workers and communities. The networks that people rely on to find a new job are much less effective when many people have been laid off at once; competition for local jobs becomes even more intense. People are more likely to be out of work for an extended period of time which, in turn, catalyzes a cascade of negative effects on local economies, from depressed demand for goods and services, to declines in physical and mental health, to increases in mortgage defaults and evictions, to higher rates of child poverty.

That’s why the federal government tracks mass layoffs and even requires employers to issue what’s called a “WARN Notice” several weeks ahead of time, alerting workers and local authorities of the pending layoffs and giving everyone some time to prepare.

Getting people back to work at wages similar to what they were earning before being laid off is a public policy imperative that, when successful, generates positive multiplier effects across the economy. If you need evidence, just consider how the influx of financial support to working families helped cushion the blow of the many mass layoff events generated by the pandemic.

But, again, federal support for the thousands, potentially tens of thousands, of unemployed federal workers is not in the cards. Any such support would contradict two of the key rationales behind the firings—that we are in a fiscal crisis and must cut federal spending and that the federal government is full of “fake jobs” that must be eliminated. No matter that the salaries of the workers fired last week are a rounding error of total federal expenditures; they will have no meaningful effect on the size of the debt or on the federal budget. Or that the people who lost their jobs last week were fired indiscriminately, with no attention to their actual roles, responsibilities, or performance. All they shared in common was the bad luck of having been on the job for less than two years.

Eliminating 10 percent of the federal workforce will not make the federal government more efficient. But it will make it less effective in the short-term and more partisan and responsive to the White House in the long-term. And the callous way in which many career servants are being forced out of their jobs—by voicemail, pre-recorded videos and for doing things like attending a DEI training—are designed to demoralize not just the person on the receiving end, but everyone still working in the federal government. That, and the brazen illegality of other firings, are designed to send a strong signal to all employers across the country and to encourage similar tactics.

There are many reasons why the Trump-Musk regime started their assault on workers with the civil service. As has been widely noted, career servants play a central role in upholding the rule of law, administering federal programs, and ensuring congressional appropriations reach their intended recipients. Eliminating their ability to act as independent watchdogs and neutral implementers of laws and regulations is a first step in many authoritarian playbooks.

But it’s not just the independence of the civil service that put it in the cross hairs of the new regime. It’s also an easy target. Media rarely depict civil servants for the committed and competent professionals they are. High level appointees from both sides of the aisle routinely denigrate career servants, blaming them for their political failures and echoing tired (and false) tropes about inflexible federal workers mindlessly putting process over outcomes. Former Obama officials urged their Democratic colleagues to embrace DOGE and accept Elon Musk as an imperfect but still necessary “disruptor.” That was before the Nazi salute, but the yearning for a dramatically smaller and weaker state is shared by the technocrats on both sides of the aisle.

So the federal career services was a convenient place for the new regime to start its war on workers, but it won’t end there. Already, the administration has taken steps to weaken labor law enforcement, hobbling the National Labor Relations Board and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, while appointing a former Amazon executive to lead the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) despite the company’s dismal safety record. The DOGE tech team has accessed confidential information on lawsuits by workers at both TESLA and SpaceX—and made sure everyone knows about it - making any further complaints extremely unlikely. The threat of deportation is terrorizing immigrant workers everywhere, both documented and undocumented. Further assaults on worker rights and organizations are coming, led by a group of self-dealing billionaires, right-wing extremists, and grifters.

It’s time to stand with federal workers today—and all workers moving forward.