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Amid the indiscriminate dismantling of the federal government by the Trump administration's Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, federal workers, thousands of whom could lose their jobs, are fighting back. "All of us do something not only essential, but also mandated by Congress," says union organizer and Army Corps of Engineers employee Chris Dols. Dols is part of a growing movement of federal workers and their allies staging mass protests to Save Our Services and warning of the long-term consequences of these extreme cuts to the bureaucracy. "They're trying to immiserate the working class, and they're doing it through the federal workforce," says Dols, who is also a national coordinator with the Federal Unionists Network. "It's about gutting the services that create a safety net in this country, because the more miserable we are, the easier it is for them to exploit us." He calls on the larger public to join the worker-led movement resisting these radical cuts. "The whole public sphere is at stake."
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Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and unelected adviser to President Donald Trump, is asserting control over much of the federal bureaucracy and sensitive government computer systems despite lacking clear authority. The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department was pushed out after refusing to hand Musk's team the keys to the government's entire payment system and the $6 trillion in payments the system processes annually, including Social Security checks, tax refunds and Medicare benefits. Musk and his team have also seized control at the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration, key institutions that function as the central nervous system of the U.S. government. "In any other situation, this would be called state capture, and people around the world would be condemning it," says Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid, who writes in a new blog post that Elon Musk is staging a coup. We also speak with Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, who warns that Musk could be laying the groundwork for major tax cuts Republicans have promised that will disproportionately benefit corporations and wealthy people like him. "Elon Musk is going to pay for his tax cut with your Social Security," says Owens.
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