DOGE is coming for you next
Federal workers are canaries in the coal mine. A union leader in the federal civil service tells us how he's fighting back
Good morning, people of The Ink. Anand here.
Do you notice something? That “How are you?” is becoming a complicated question? Every time you ask someone that question now, a strange ritual needs to be entered in which you separate the state of the world from your own state, if that is possible, and only then answer.
They’re trying to take away our greetings, too.
But I won’t be deterred. How are you? We hope you’re hanging in.
Let’s do some honest accounting for a moment. Here’s what we don’t have right now: a good president or an opposition that knows how to fight. Or clarity about what Elon Musk’s job is.
But here is what we DO have: numbers. Our ranks are growing. Our rage is coalescing. And people are beginning to listen and feel afraid.
I’ve noticed in recent days, in our very active chat, that many of you ask: But how can we make sure these worthy ideas, these messages, get to more people? It’s a good question.
The simple answer is by sharing them ever wider every day. And it’s working. I want you to know that, in a day or three, this newsletter will hit a big milestone in turns of followers that I would have laughed at if you told me when I started this in 2020. People are waking up to the assault on our democracy, and to the cowardly silences of so many big institutions in politics and media, and we are building something new.
I’m grateful to be in this with you. Thank you. Help us reach further by sharing The Ink and, if you haven’t yet, becoming a supporting subscriber. Or gift us to someone you care about.
Now on to our feature presentation. Today we have a powerful, sobering, and essential interview for you. It’s about the real project underlying DOGE. Don’t miss it. — AG
About yesterday…
It’s hard to keep up, and we get it. Just in the last 24 hours we’ve heard that:
Elon Musk is set to pad his wallet by another $2.4 billion — by stealing Verizon’s FAA contract
Musk continues to create problems to solve…like, say, the problems at the FAA
Jeff Bezos has quashed dissent at the Post and redefined “personal liberties” to mean “his personal liberties”
After years of QAnon railing about an international cabal of sex traffickers, the Trump administration is — importing international sex traffickers.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is waving off the first measles death in a decade.
Project 2025 architect Russell Vought has upped the ante on traumatizing the federal workforce, demanding “large-scale reductions in force”
And Trump’s minions are resegregating America — even scrapping a program that lets talented kids work with the Marine Band.
This is all in the service of grift on a grand scale. But now that America has fucked around and is starting to find out, there are a couple of things to keep in mind:
Nobody deserves this
We don’t have to take it lying down
What do we mean by that? First, don’t dismiss those folks — our friends and neighbors, as Tim Walz might have put it — who voted the wrong way. It’s time to get out in the street and do some convincing. And it’s happening.
The canary in the coal mine alerting us all to what the Trump-Musk(-Vance?) administration has in mind has always been working people, and no matter how many balls are in the air, we have to keep our eye on that one. Federal workers were first on the chopping block as DOGE’s junior developers started their purge, and even though some 30,000 people have been let go, that’s only the beginning (look back up at that last bullet point, above).
Getting rid of the folks who keep things running, who keep us safe, who make things better — that’s key to the rest of the large-scale thievery Trump and his minions have planned. We just talked about why good government is the key to the lives we enjoy earlier this week in the newsletter, and we’re going to keep talking about it.
Protecting that is why we have to oppose what’s happening — and it’s why labor organizers are doing just that.
Last week the Federal Unionists Network (FUN), an affiliation of federal union locals, organized Save Our Services, a day of action meant to raise the alarm about the plight of federal workers that brought protestors out in the streets nationwide (and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez out for a typically impassioned speech in support of the rights of public employees).
Chris Dols is an Army Corps of Engineers cost engineer and a union officer: he’s also the president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) Local 98 and a national coordinator with FUN. You may have seen Dols on TikTok, sounding the alarm about how once Musk and DOGE and Vought and OMB are done with public employees — they’re coming for everybody else.
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We caught up with Dols to talk about how FUN is fighting back, why the public unions are so important, how to move ahead even given the Democratic Party’s inability to wean itself off of the donor class, and why the current crisis is also a moment of revolutionary possibility.
What exactly is Elon Musk after in these rounds of firings, from your perspective? A point you've made a few times is that what’s going on is a concerted attack on the idea of public employment overall.
I think what they're doing is they're quickly going through starting with the easiest to justify. So the termination of probationary employees in their most disfavored agencies is to be followed pretty quickly by even some of their favorite agencies.
Elon Musk, I think, has been pretty clearly given the keys to the whole workforce question. And it's really not about the workforce. It's really about gutting the ability of regulatory agencies to do their work. I don't think it's just Elon Musk self-serving, though it's worth noting the self-serving aspect of it, like the CFPB is responsible for regulating Tesla, because Tesla, like all auto companies, is in financing.
The Overton window has shifted so much. The idea that a man with so much interest in government contracts, literally the richest man in the world — the whole thing is so on the nose it's hard to believe — and he's going agency by agency, toppling any regulatory authority that might ever threaten his bottom line.
It's an attack on our services, and they use this caricature of the lazy federal worker to justify it. That's just their political justification.
They want to break the stuff that makes government functional for people so they can make real this right-wing fantasy that government just sucks and there's nothing to look for there.
I think it's even worse than that. I was recently trying to learn some of history and understand what Viktor Orbán did in Hungary, and that's exactly what's happening here: override the independence of any media, create an echo chamber in the public sphere, and establish political hegemony of the executive. It’s exactly what Trump is doing.
Ultimately it's about turning the entire civil service and executive branch into an extension of the political will of the White House, which, of course, is not its constitutional function. But that's what they want to do, and that's what they're doing as fast as possible. And they're banking on the weakness of the Democratic Party opposition to make it happen.
So what is happening in Congress? where is GAO, the Government Accountability Office, in this? There’s an agency that is supposed to do this kind of stuff?
There are so many failings of the legislative branch right now. And GAO, as you may know, sits within the legislative branch, so I would just look to the leadership of Congress. Even the Republicans, however much they see their political fortunes as tied to the White House, in theory, do have a commitment or obligation to protect the division of powers. But they're ceding so much. Everything that they're doing, whether they're shuttering the CFPB, or sitting by as agencies that were authorized by Congress are defunded, is a violation of the executive branch's obligation to do what Congress tells them to.
It's bad enough that the Republican leadership of Congress is letting it happen. But I'd say the real failing is that the official opposition has thrown their hands up. As if the Republicans, whenever they were in the minority, threw their hands up and said, “There's nothing we can do.”
You have some Democrats, AOC for instance, who are very much in your camp and have been speaking out.
It's mostly the left, with a couple of brave liberals in the mix, but not enough.
What do you think the Democrats could be doing to defend federal workers?
There's so much they could be doing to be more obstructionist in Congress. Look at what the Republicans did under Biden. The Democrats should be doing their own version of gumming up the works for the majority at every turn. So that's that's the easy answer.
The harder answer is a question of political will, to put out a call for the social forces in our society to actually get activated. And here I'm talking about the labor movement, thinking about how all of civil society has a stake in defending the civil service, and democracy.
A few weeks ago, before Trump was actually inaugurated, before we saw the scale of it, people threw around the F-word: fascism. People talked about democracy at risk, and sometimes it felt like maybe it was a little extreme, but now I think it's pretty darn clear that’s what we're dealing with.
If anything, maybe it was an underestimate.
I just don't know that it can land, if people can hear it. But now we need people to hear it. You know you have Governor Pritzker in Illinois, the speech he gave, with explicit reference to the rise of the Nazis.
We need to sound the alarm. That's why the slogan of our demonstrations was S-O-S. It's a distress signal by us in the federal workforce. But I think it is only going to work — we're only going to have a chance of stopping them or even slowing them down — if we activate civil society in defense of the institutions.
Look, there’s a lot of problems with the institutions and that's part of why they're getting away with this. The government actually doesn't do everything great. And we government workers are actually the best critics of it. So if we come out and say, Look, we know the government actually doesn't do enough to regulate. We know that the government has allowed for-profit healthcare to leave millions of Americans in debt — but the problems with the government shouldn't lead to the abolition of the government and the abolition of all the regulatory authorities of the Government. We need to go in the other direction. We need a government that serves the common good.
That's only going to happen if we mobilize.
So one problem is that you can't say to people, “Hey, we need to fix this and go back to how we were before the inauguration,” because that was also bad, and they feel that. You have to make the case for building the next thing.
Our main objective right now is to open up a real left-wing anti-establishment lane in American politics, because the right has managed to dominate the discussion for anybody who hates the system. It had an expression in the Bernie campaigns. But because Bernie went all in on Biden. It undermined the longer-term appeal of any kind of meaningful alternative on the left. And so go figure — a lot of Bernie voters in 2016 wound up voting for Trump.
Public sector unions have a really rich recent history of militancy, and not just in the blue states. Think about the Red State Revolt, the teachers' strikes in West Virginia and Arizona, and Kentucky.
We also have its expression in the Chicago Teachers Union and the Massachusetts Teachers Association. The idea that “teachers’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions,” captures so brilliantly that unions can advocate, not just for the workers that they represent, but also for the broader common good. We need to figure out today the federal version of that if we’re going to save the federal service.
The challenge is articulating the position that government can do good things for people — just what the right has worked so hard to destroy.
One of my colleagues made the important point that the best evidence of the quality of federal service and what it does for the American public is actually how invisible it is. The fact that you don't hear about all of the ways in which the people at the FDA make sure that your food is safe to eat, and the water is safe to drink. Or how the EPA protects the air that you breathe. It's the absence of news stories that actually evidence of the function of the government.
And this is why vaccine denial is out there, too, because nobody's getting sick. But then you get to this point where you’re left asking, do people need to fuck around and find out? And that's a terrible thing.
I think that's where we are. We're finding out, but we don't want to. I don't want in two years to be like, “Told you so. We lost the democracy.” I want to figure out a way to demonstrate immediately that the services you depend on, for your healthcare, or to take care of your parents, are funded by or subsidized by federal funding.
This came up during the campaign when Harris proposed letting long-term carers bill Medicare directly. A transformative proposal in terms of government delivering public goods, and helping people in a huge way.
They wouldn't even have needed to do that. It would have helped if they had just retained the Child Tax Credit! It saved parents thousands of dollars. Had they just dug in on retaining it, that alone would probably have motivated many more Democrats who sat home that day because they felt abandoned.
They felt abandoned. They felt undefended. We keep coming back to this in the newsletter that that was a big driver of dissatisfaction and voter apathy. That sense that these people are not looking out for me. They're looking out for something else. They’re looking out for donors.
We keep winding back here because it is such an important point. This split nature of the Democratic party, this kind of dual personality where it simultaneously purports to represent the interests of organized labor and every group with a righteous grievance against the society that we live in, and it is also an establishment party of the ruling class and historically big tech.
But whether it's finance or insurance, all of the sectors of the economy whose big business expression lined up with the Democrats, created this problem that led to Obama's complete failure to deliver healthcare reform in a way that could have consolidated a voting base for a generation.
In the public imagination, Biden had turned the government in a real pro-labor direction. But you were already making it clear during his administration that labor needed more.
Biden's record on labor was strong. If you look at the NLRB, if you look at Jennifer Abruzzo, if you look at what happened there for the private sector, but on the federal side it really was very disappointing. Joe Biden never put any of his capital into making sure Chuck Schumer approved any of the multiple nominees that he put forward.
We saw the need for a more assertive approach towards the Biden administration. We grew slowly but steadily over the last year and a half, and then, obviously with the election of Trump, we were particularly well positioned to take on this fight, which is much greater and much more existential.
Why do you think they decided it wasn't worth doing that? And why didn’t federal workers have the support of Congress?
I think it's because they're management. They're literally the bosses, the President and the White House and the administration through their political appointees, and then Congress, which I think of as like the Board of Directors of all the agencies. So in a way, the White House and the executive branch, and Congress can play more of an arbiter role in private-sector labor relations. In the federal context, there's just no denying that Congress and the White House are management, and it takes a real principled approach by political leadership to side with labor, or just sufficient power from below. The only times really in history that the federal workforce has won major victories have been when our power was so undeniable that even the leadership of the executive branch — I'm thinking about Nixon during the postal strike in 1970 — feel compelled to side with labor.
Did the lack of leadership going into the beginning of the Trump administration put federal workers in a worse position?
The way that I and many of my collaborators in the FUN talked about it was that under Biden we had a window of opportunity and we didn't know when it was gonna close — it might be five years, it might be nine years, but we knew there would be another Republican administration, and it would be an all-out war on us, and we should be using now to prepare for that and build our capacity to respond. And of course, it was one year, not five or nine, and here we are.
But the FUN did emerge and started practicing collective action. Many of our locals in the FUN are the locals whose leaders have been experimenting with legal collective action over the last couple of years, have been sharing those experiences, and have been supporting each other in meaningful, solidaristic ways.
We have a very strong network. We're not as big as I'd like us to be, although we're growing rapidly now, and we gotta figure out how to incorporate all that new growth in a meaningful way in a moment of relative crisis. The whole sector, I think, missed an opportunity, but fortunately, some of us were preparing. What we need to do quickly is scale up and bring in many more people who are angry and confident
Can the Democrats actually become a working-class party?
It feels like a real moment for potential. It's hard to talk about a labor party right now, but the crisis of the Democratic Party does feel like it's an opportunity to introduce those themes.
I think the real answer to this question lies in their paralysis. I think the only thing that can really break the paralysis is gonna be sufficient mobilization of forces that make them do the calculus, make them ask, “What if we're going to lose some of the money?” It's really between people and money, and if we can get them to abandon the money in favor of the people by mobilizing the people sufficiently well…honestly, that seems like the only alternative.
This gets to a larger point that you have made, which is that this ultimately isn't just about federal workers. This is a test case for all workers, for all working people. The powers that are in charge of this administration would love to bring this kind of assault against everyone who works.
Yeah, and there are a few different aspects to it. There's the most direct attack, like the way they're attacking the NLRB. They're hoping to declare the National Labor Relations Act itself unconstitutional. That's the most direct attack on the broader private sector workforce.
But they’re attacking the existence of a baseline standard, whether it's around safety and health, or whether it's around minimum wage laws, or whether it's around legal rights. What they're trying to do is remove the floor from under us, because the harder it is to be poor, the harder it is to organize and fight back, and the easier it is for them to exploit us.
How do you make this point salient for people, whether as workers or as people who need services, who need education, who need anything?
I actually think the the immigration debate is a really good example of this, where it's the unwillingness of the most powerful forces of the Democratic Party to actually raise the actual solution that's needed, that gives way to the right-wing explanation instead. And so Trump says the immigrants are taking your jobs — and the answer to that isn't necessarily no, because it’s obvious to anyone that an immigrant who's willing to work for less is taking that job.
But the real answer is that's only possible because immigrants don’t have the same rights in America as everybody else. The solution isn't to villainize and deport the most vulnerable people in our society. The answer is to elevate their rights and raise the floor. The opposition is unwilling to go there because of their split personality and their loyalty to corporate interests.
They also feel like they can't convince anyone differently.
They just assume people are inherently xenophobic. I bet every topic has a corollary where the official left answer to the right-wing charge is compromised by an unwillingness to actually go to the root of the problem.
So how can you make these issues tangible for people? How do you communicate about these underlying conditions without losing people?
Minds move quickly in moments of crisis and struggle. We're not going to shift the political thinking just because we formulate it correctly. It's going to be because the broader objective circumstances lend people to a new explanation. You know, they're making revolutionary conditions in a way. They're really turning up the heat on the pressure cooker.
Large parts of the ruling class were behind a lot of regulations, to stabilize the system. I mean, just the basic economic regulations, to make sure that banks aren't liable to take down the whole economy. To say nothing of the stabilizing role of basic labor regulation as expressed by the NLRA, to say nothing of the public health crises that could emerge or the climate crisis that is already here. There are so many destabilizing aspects of what they're doing.
We obviously want to find the best way to communicate these points, and do it as well as we can. But I think there's no shortcut for the base building, organizing the hard work of the one-on-ones, the scaling up of organizing and bringing people into the movement, and giving them real ownership of it. Because if we're going to have a movement to save democracy, it better be the most democratic movement we've ever had, and that's going to involve mass participation — a mass participation social movement is the only way out of this.
Here's the thing, and I quote: "Our main objective right now is to open up a real left-wing anti-establishment lane in American politics, because the right has managed to dominate the discussion for anybody who hates the system." The system has become hollowed out by shadowy forces supported by dark money, aka untrammeled capitalism. I say untrammeled because capitalism per se is not the base problem. IMO the root of the poisonous tree is greed born of fear, which behaves like a highly contagious virus, convincing too many of us that if we only concentrate on building our own wealth (sometimes in dizzying amounts and nefarious ways) life will be good. Well, that's a big, fat Effing Lie. The best things in life are love of family, friends and our fellowships with other living beings like plants and animals, with whom we live to our mutual benefit. We are all in this world, this life, together, and what harms others, harms us. No getting around that unless you swallow the Kool-Aid. IMHO Progressive change is the single best, and perhaps the only way to go, because it holds those truths to be self-evident.
A pastoral response to living in these days that has helped me deal with this tragedy at times.
Part of what we're feeling, besides fear and anger, is grief. Allow yourself to grieve. It's not all over, by any means. But we are losing something we love. Don’t deny yourself permission to be brokenhearted for this nation. Our anger isn’t mere self-righteous rage; our fury isn't merely panic. Our grief isn’t resignation but honesty that we go forward as broken people in a broken world, and therefore we go tenderly, even in our strength. Our grief isn't defeat but the longing for wholeness that in fact energizes us. Our grief enables us to let go even as we resist. Our grief beckons us to bond with each other, to keep friendships close, to stay connected with what and who we love. We stand by the grave of a loved one and wish we could bring them back from the dead, but can't—yet this loss is not final. Our grief empowers us to do all we can to bring back America from its dying. Grieve, my beloved. Give wings to your sorrow. Then turn that sorrow into song. Give flesh to your grief in art, in new friendships, in creative energy. Find beauty, and stay with it. Grieve, and resist.
-Rev. Steve Garnaas-Holmes