Federal workers are in DOGE’s crosshairs as Trump tries to forge a leaner, meaner state machine and reduce the federal deficit. In its first round of layoffs, DOGE’s whiz kids fired tens of thousands of workers across the country. The New York Times reports that 56,000 jobs have been slashed, more than 76,000 additional employees took buyouts, and no fewer than 146,000 more cuts are coming. As much as 12% of the 2.4 million-strong federal workforce could be affected.
The DC bureaucracy may seem like a faceless behemoth, but the ordinary workers in the firing line are the people who process passport applications and unemployment claims, test food for quality and safety, and monitor public health threats like HIV and lead poisoning. Naturally, many government agencies do work that is useless or even harmful, like administering the US military and surveillance apparatus. But rank-and-file workers are not to blame for the imperialist policies of the class enemy. Instead of being fired, they should be reassigned to useful, socially necessary work.
Shameless attack on workers
Trump’s cuts are not only causing chaos at federal agencies, they’re a direct attack on the labor movement as a whole. The first workers to go when the administration halved the Department of Education last month were members of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE). The union represents over 820,000 federal workers, including VA nurses, park rangers, and Social Security clerks. Roughly 34% of the federal workforce belongs to the union.
AFGE and other federal employee unions have turned to the courts in a lukewarm attempt to reinstate their members. Some lower courts have ruled in favor of federal workers, only to have their decisions overturned or paused by the appeals circuit and the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, Trump trained his sights on the unions, issuing an executive order on March 27 to end collective bargaining for federal agencies where so-called “national security” was supposedly at risk. Not only did this include the Department of Defense and Homeland Security, but others we might not associate with “security,” like the Justice Department and Health and Human Services. The scope of “national security” is so expansive that it apparently includes the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, and the Federal Communications Commission! This is a bald-faced attack on workers’ rights, in anticipation of an even broader sweep of layoffs to come.
The executive order bars the AFGE or any other federal union from suing the Oval Office to reverse layoffs. Workers need to fight back against this attack, but to win, the union’s primary tactic can’t be appealing to the courts.
The American “justice” system is an institution built by and for the capitalist class. The 2018 ruling of Janus v. AFSCME, which imposed so-called “right to work” anti-union laws on the public sector, shows as much. In a failed attempt to “pressure” the courts, unions called a sclerotic “day of action,” one-day demonstrations that did not shut down workplaces or threaten the normal functioning of the government. These weak tactics won’t be any more effective in 2025.
Workers never won anything by appealing to the conscience of the ruling class. / Image: AFGENational, X
PATCO turned up to 11
What we are witnessing is akin to the 1981 PATCO strike—when Ronald Reagan declared an air-traffic controllers’ strike illegal and fired 11,000 workers. Rather than mounting a militant struggle against the president, the AFL-CIO wrote a “strongly worded letter.”
Union membership had been on the decline since the 1950s, when one-third of the American workforce was unionized. The busting of PATCO accelerated this process. Now only 11.1% of workers are union members. However, 32.2% of public-sector workers are unionized. The very unions under attack today are, in theory, the strongest in the country and should be able to lead the most effective fight.
But AFGE is only holding small protests, informational pickets, and sending letters to congressional representatives to cosponsor the “Protect America’s Workforce Act,” which would repeal Trump’s executive order against public-sector collective bargaining. To repeat, neither the courts nor Congress represent the interests of the working class.
Workers never won anything by appealing to the conscience of the ruling class. We did not win the eight-hour day by appealing to the courts or our alleged “allies” in the House. The right to organize was not handed to us by the Wagner Act of 1935. It was won, in practice, through a series of militant strikes in 1934—most notably the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike, which was transformed into a citywide general strike under the leadership of the Communist League of America.
Militant struggle needed
Mass demonstrations can be a start, but the only way to win a fight like this is through militant, class-struggle methods: sit-down strikes, occupying government buildings, and the mass mobilization of as many workers across as many industries as possible. If TSA workers went on strike, imagine the impact on the air transportation industry. Federal workers must also coordinate with their brothers and sisters in the Postal Service, who are under attack by the same boss. An injury to one is an injury to all in the labor struggle, and this is an opportunity for the working class to strike back!
If federal workers put forward a series of demands that appeal to the class as a whole, they could mobilize millions of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security recipients to join the fight. Healthcare professionals inside and outside the government will be deeply impacted by these cuts, and university workers are next to be squeezed by the Trump administration. There are millions of workers, unionized and nonunionized, who could join federal workers fighting in the streets and in their workplaces.
Federal workers need a leadership that’s willing to take the struggle all the way. The very existence of the labor movement is under attack—now is the time for serious class-war tactics. An attack on federal workers is an attack on the entire labor movement, and the livelihoods of the US working class are at stake. A victory for the federal workers will strengthen the entire working class.
Make the billionaire bankers and bosses pay for their crisis!
Organize resistance committees in every workplace to plan and carry out an effective fight back! Return to the proud traditions of the 1930s sit-down strikes!
No trust in the capitalist courts! The power of the united working class is our only defense!
No trust in the Democrats or Republicans—join the RCA and build a mass communist party!