Head-Spinning Pace

The federal government is the largest employer in the United States, with 2.4 million civilian workers (excluding the US Postal Service). Attacking this workforce has become a central plank of Trump’s program.

In his first term, he claimed that the “deep state” and the “swamp,” meaning civil servants, were constantly undermining him through inaction or sabotage. This time, with increased vigor (and more planning), and aided by Musk and his acolytes, Trump has made a head-spinning number of moves to reshape and undermine federal agencies and the federal workforce.

Three months before the end of his first term, Trump signed an executive order creating a new class of at-will, political-appointee federal jobs into which his administration could move workers who were typically covered by civil service protections. These workers could now be fired much more easily.

Joe Biden quickly undid this order, but when Trump returned, he immediately resurrected it. He has since made administrative moves to get ready to shift an unknown number of workers into these so-called “Policy/Career” positions (originally called “Schedule F”).

After announcing plans to eliminate tens of thousands of jobs, Musk and Trump sent out an email to two million federal workers offering them a chance to resign now and still get paid through September. The email mirrored one sent to Twitter employees after Musk took over the social media company, down to its “Fork in the Road” subject heading.

Among the workers who received the email were air traffic controllers. It appeared in their inboxes the day before a deadly crash in Washington, DC; the control tower was understaffed.

Musk, with Trump’s blessing, has targeted agencies one by one for scrutiny and partial — or full — shutdown. The US Agency for International Development, which provides foreign aid, was unceremoniously shut down — 7,000 workers were put on administrative leave or fired; even the agency’s nameplate was removed from the entrance to its headquarters.

Seventeen hundred workers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which was created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to provide oversight of the financial services sector, were instructed not to show up to work and to stop many of their investigations. Days later, dozens of these workers who were still in their probationary periods — and thus, the government claims, not covered by union protections — were fired in an after-hours email.

Trump has since put 200,000 more workers in their probationary periods on the chopping block, and announced deep cuts to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Energy Department, Housing and Urban Development, and the Forestry Service.

Outrage and Resistance

Besides confusion and fear, these moves have provoked outrage in the federal workforce. In the week after the “Fork in the Road” email, hundreds of workers took to Reddit and other social media to denounce the offer as an unenforceable scam.

In another measure of resistance — or at least mistrust — workers have not flocked to take the resignation deal, despite the vague threat of future layoffs. Musk said he hoped 5 to 10 percent of eligible federal workers would take the deal; the government-reported number shows that 75,000, or around 3 percent, did. For comparison, around 150,000 federal workers retire or quit every year.

Less than twenty-four hours after receiving the emails that they had been fired, CFPB probationary workers organized pickets in New York City, Washington DC, San Francisco, and Chicago.

“On Tuesday night, we each started getting these cryptic emails to our personal accounts,” said Chris Fasano, an attorney in the CFPB’s enforcement division and a member of National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) Chapter 335. “We immediately got on a call with sixty or seventy of us. We talked about everything that was wrong, and how we had to notify the national [union] leadership and have a legal strategy — but that that wasn’t enough and that we wanted to take to the street.”

By 10 p.m., they had decided to hold an information picket at noon the next day. They scrambled to reach out to coworkers and allies, and to make signs and flyers. In New York City, “we were expecting maybe a dozen people,” Fasano said. “We had maybe a hundred show up.” They included CFPB workers (fired and not), other NTEU members, and members of other unions and community groups.

Hai Binh Nguyen, an enforcement attorney at the CFPB, helped organize the San Francisco rally and reported a similar outpouring of support. “There’s a lot of support for the Bureau and our work,” Nguyen said. “It was amazing to have everyone see that we’re just the first domino to fall.”

Membership Surges

Federal workers are spread across a handful of unions, the largest of which are the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), representing 800,000 workers, and the NTEU, representing 150,000.

There’s also the NFFE, a Machinists affiliate; the Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), which represents 30,000 workers at agencies like NASA, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Tennessee Valley Authority; and National Nurses United, which represents 15,000 nurses at the Veterans Affairs.

Federal worker unions are relatively limited in what they can bargain. Wages are off the table — those are set by Congress, and wage increases have to be passed as law. But they do negotiate over working conditions issues like discipline, scheduling, and remote work. (Postal workers are an exception; although they work for the federal government, they have collective bargaining rights and are covered by the National Labor Relations Act alongside private sector workers.)

The federal sector is “open shop”: workers represented by a union aren’t required to join it. So while AFGE represents 800,000 workers, it has 321,000 members. While NTEU represents 150,000, it has 87,000 members.

But AFGE and other federal unions have reported significant membership increases since the election and particularly after Trump’s inauguration. According to the Federal News Network, AFGE gained 8,000 members in January and 8,200 in the first ten days of February. Compare that to the 7,400 members it gained in all of 2024, including newly organized workplaces.

“We’ve seen a massive increase in new membership,” said Lauren Lieb, a land law examiner at the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in New Mexico, and a chapter president and chief steward with NTEU Chapter 340, “including former holdouts who are finally coming on board and getting really engaged.” Lieb’s BLM group unionized relatively recently, in 2020, and they’ve been hearing from workers at other agencies asking how to do the same.

Smith at NFFE Local 1 reports a similar uptick. He and others have started holding weekly “Unions 101” sessions at the VA for federal workers; he says 170 to 180 people participate every week on their lunch breaks to learn about “unions — what they do, how they work, and updates about what’s going on.” Membership meetings are drawing the highest turnout ever in the local’s twenty-five-year history.

AFGE and other groups of workers have held rallies in DC and around the country, denouncing the attacks. Unions and other organizations have also filed lawsuits over a number of Trump and Musk actions — including the email offering resignation, the attempt to move workers out of civil service categories, and Musk’s access to sensitive Treasury Department data.

Legal actions have succeeded in temporarily stalling some policy changes, but not yet overturned any. Lawsuits move slowly; they can’t match the frenzied pace at which Trump and Musk are operating.

A Force Multiplier

At the grassroots, activists are building connections across unions — sharing accurate information and strategies to fight back. One formation is the Federal Unionists Network (FUN), which has added thousands of federal workers to its rolls in an explosion of interest since the November election, through email lists, group chats, zoom calls, and in-person events and rallies.

FUN grew out of informal cross-union attempts to pressure Biden and the Democrats over changes to federal worker policies, as well as reform efforts inside particular federal unions. It held its first meeting at the 2024 Labor Notes Conference in Chicago. “That really catalyzed our efforts,” said Smith, who is active in the network.

After that, he said, “FUN was humming along, a little smaller, more informal, building more slowly, and then all of a sudden it was an emergency, and we started growing and expanding very quickly.”

FUN held a meetup in Washington, DC, in the middle of AFGE and IFPTE’s legislative conferences, bringing together union leaders and activists from eight federal agencies to talk about what’s happening and how they’re taking on the challenge.

Union locals in the federal sector are extremely uneven. Some are essentially paper locals, with membership under 10 percent and little to no activity. So FUN has also been a place for workers to get accurate information about the administration’s attacks and learn how to get organized.

“We’ve been able to share resources like filing info requests, coordinating strategies together that we can execute independently within our own locals — it has been a really great and powerful tool to be able to stay in the fight,” said Lieb.

“Historically union locals in the federal sectors have been fragmented, isolated, and there haven’t been a ton of resources for support,” said Smith. “To be able to connect with hundreds of really engaged unionists all across the country has been such a force multiplier. People are developing as leaders, activists, at such a rapid pace because they’re able to get support and help.”