The second Trump administration opened with an all-out assault on the operation of the US government. In open defiance of the law, the president has unilaterally shut down federal agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. At the Treasury Department, Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has been allowed to access payment systems in an attempt to selectively cut off congressionally mandated payments. And the Office of Personnel Management sent an email to more than two million civilian employees of the federal government, encouraging them to take buyouts and quit their jobs or face the prospect of being arbitrarily fired later, in a move Musk said he hoped would eliminate 10 percent of all federal jobs.

To understand how this onslaught is affecting the federal workforce and how workers are fighting back, Jacobin spoke to Colin Smalley, an employee at the Army Corps of Engineers. He is president of Local 777 of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), as well as an organizer with the Federal Unionists Network (FUN). In this interview, Smalley explains how attacks on federal employees pose a danger not just to them, and to the functioning of the government, but to the conditions of the entire working class.