The Federal Unionists Network Resists Trump

Labor organizers have a saying: “The boss is the best organizer. ” While employer attacks don’t always or even normally lead to working-class resistance, it is certainly the case that Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s authoritarian wrecking-ball operation against public services and American democracy was the major spur toward federal workers’ organizing in early 2025. The broader stakes of this struggle were perhaps best captured by a chant federal activists regularly lead at protests: Wake up, wake up—this is a coup. When they’re done with us, they’re coming for you. Wake up, wake up, this is your fight too. When they’re done with us, they’re coming for you. In this short piece I outline the growth and challenges of the Federal Unionists Network (FUN). Begun in 2022 as a small WhatsApp group of federal worker activists, the FUN transformed itself after Donald Trump’s reelection in 2024 into the main fightback organization of and for federal employees to save the civil service. Though its reach is still significantly lower than necessary to reverse the new administration’s attacks, the FUN has successfully activated tens of thousands of federal employees and articulated a compelling vision for how to protect and improve the services that hundreds of millions of Americans depend on. Federal employees are in many ways an exceptionally difficult sector to organize. The successes and limitations of the FUN need to be situated within this broader context. Most employees within the civil service keep their heads down. One major reason for this tight-lipped political culture is the Hatch Act, which regulates federal employee speech and partisan activity. Just as many workers in red states incorrectly believe that “right to work” laws prevent them from joining unions, so too have many federal employees mistakenly assumed that the Hatch Act prevents them from getting involved in any form of political or union activism. Such views have fed into a risk-averse culture compounded by the civil service’s reputation for job security. Many people take federal jobs because relatively stable employment makes up for relatively low pay compared to the private sector. As Mark Smith, a FUN activist and worker at a Veterans Administration hospital in San Francisco, told me, “Feds are rules followers” not known for their risk-taking inclinations. The dispersion of federal workers and their unions across agencies and regions is no less of a challenge. Though right-wing politicians always portray federal workers as part of the Washington bureaucracy, in fact 85 percent of federal workers are employed elsewhere in the country. And they work in an alphabet soup of agencies and are represented by over a dozen unions, the largest of which is the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE). Despite their common employers, and despite often organizing workers at the same agencies, most federal unions do not normally coordinate with each other. As three of the FUN’s cofounders put it in an October 2022 article, “The result of such an atomized workforce is that federal workers exert far too little political and bargaining power for our numbers. ”1Indeed, for a workforce numbering well over two million workers—not including over six hundred thousand postal workers—federal workers until recently have played a remarkably limited role in American politics and the labor movement generally. This punching-below-their-weight dynamic partially reflects legal restrictions. The civil service is an “open shop” in which workers represented by unions do not need to pay dues: Though about half of federal workers are represented by a union, only about 20 percent are actually members. Even more consequential, there is no right to strike in the federal sector, nor is there full collective bargaining. Unable to bargain over pay or benefits, federal employee unions can only negotiate over working conditions. Moribund union internal structures are the norm. Organizing and mobilizing cultures are a rare exception. Faced with federal unions’ atomization and lethargy, a small group of federal workers in 2022 began pushing in a new direction. Most were left-leaning rank-and-file workers who were simultaneously their local union presidents. (Most federal sector local presidents do their normal day job while receiving some “official time” dispensation to fulfill union responsibilities. ) They first got in touch with each other in response to a grassroots effort launched by Chris Dols, a federal engineer in the Army Corps of Engineers and president of IFPTE Local 98, to pressure Chuck Schumer to confirm President Biden’s nominee Ernest DuBester to the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA), the agency that regulates federal union rights. Though such a nomination would have reestablished a pro-union majority in the FLRA, Schumer did not ultimately meet the workers’ demand. Nevertheless, the campaign drew together some core activists, and it fed into a first-ever in-person, cross-union meetup of federal workers at the 2022 Labor Notes conference. As three participants put it, their goal was to “develop a new strategy to rebuild federal unionism from the bottom up. ”2The following year Dols and Smith set up a WhatsApp community to allow for ongoing discussion nationwide. These digital chats remained the FUN’s only infrastructure until the new Trump administration obliged—and made possible—widespread rank-and-file federal worker resistance. Everybody knew that Donald Trump’s reelection in November 2024 was very bad news for federal workers and their unions. But few people expected Trump to move quite as fast and as brutally as he did. Though FUN activists in the first weeks and months of his new administration were more predisposed to fight than others, they too were largely caught flat-footed by the ferocity and speed of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), with its daily announcement of mass layoffs and its push for wholesale agency closures. Chaos and fear prevailed. Colin Smalley, a FUN leader in Chicago who works at the Army Corps of Engineers, described the impact of DOGE’s attacks in a mid-February interview: “They try to sow fear, and they try to convince everybody that their situation is helpless. And whether it’s lawful or not, they do have a tremendous amount of power and control right now. So they are taking actions that are scaring people and making them feel helpless, depressed, confused, and upset. ”3One of the first acts of resistance of FUN activists and other federal employees nationwide was simply to keep working in such a hostile climate. When Elon Musk infamously sent a “fork in the road” email urging federal employees to quit, these workers did everything possible to convince their coworkers not to give in to the intimidation. To their credit, federal unions generally conveyed the same message to their members, and they put real resources into legal challenges against Trump and DOGE’s attacks. These courtroom initiatives have so far partially succeeded in blocking some of the new administration’s most blatantly illegal attacks. But FUN activists felt that a litigation strategy, while necessary, was politically insufficient. As they noted in their public agitation and in one-on-one conversations with coworkers, many of the temporary legal stays on DOGE’s moves would ultimately be adjudicated by an arch-conservative Supreme Court. And lawsuits did nothing to address the large number of layoffs that, while morally and politically reactionary, are technically legal. Nor could lawsuits undercut the overall climate of fear or shift the dominant political narrative about governmental inefficiency. For those goals, large numbers of workers had to speak out. In early February, at a moment when almost no federal workers were willing to go on record with the media due to fear of reprisals, FUN leaders Chris Dols, Alissa Tafti, Paul Osadabe, and MT Snyder went on CNN and MSNBC to put a face on the workforce that Musk was busy demonizing. One challenge they confronted was that journalists were mostly interested in telling the human interest story of fired workers and workplace chaos rather than talking about the impact on services to everyday Americans, a topic that FUN leaders felt would resonate more widely. Thus, in a February 15 interview with CNN, Dols repeatedly pivoted back to the FUN’s main message: We need to hold the line and protect the government that they’re trying to break up, because our services are so critical. In my corner of the government, we do dredging to maintain shipping channels so the economy can work. We build and maintain floodwalls and levees to protect American homes and communities. We were the folks who built the emergency hospitals at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. So really, our work touches everything from the economy as a whole to your local communities and your personal health and moments of public health crises. So for the people who are trying to purge the government, we’re trying to hold the line because it’s those of us who have committed our careers to the public service that are going to keep it going if we can stop these attacks. . . . You look at Elon Musk, who is, of course, the architect and executioner here. He’s already benefiting from more than 18 billion in federal contracts over the last ten years. And he calls recipients of federal aid “parasites. ” Elon Musk is the parasite here. 4This focus reflected the FUN’s analysis that widespread public backlash was their pivotal point of leverage to stop DOGE. In that same spirit, an early FUN fact sheet explained the following: —Contrary to right-wing claims about a massively expanded federal bureaucracy, the percentage of the American workforce working for the federal government has declined significantly over the past twenty-five years. —Musk’s reckless operation threatens enormous numbers of Americans. Without federal workers at sufficiently funded agencies, no one in the United States would be able to receive benefits such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or workplace safety protections, among many other essential services. Local schools and hospitals all across the country also depend on federal funding. —Billionaires, not federal employees, are hoarding America’s wealth: Total yearly pay for all 2. 3 million civilian federal employees (271 billion) is significantly less than Elon Musk’s personal net worth of 412 billion. 5Though speaking out through the press and over social media was important, FUN leaders insisted that bottom-up organizing was the primary mechanism to generate the scale of popular backlash necessary to win. As Paul Osadebe, a unionist in AFGE Local 476, explained to a FUN online meeting of and for federal employees, “There’s no one who’s going to come in and save us at the end of all of this. But you do have the power to save yourself. ”6As of late January 2025, the FUN was still just a small WhatsApp community. But given the urgent need to respond to DOGE’s mass layoffs, and given the federal unions’ unwillingness to initiate nationwide protests, FUN activists took a risky leap into the unknown by calling for a Save Our Services nationwide day of action on February 19. Even though national unions stayed aloof, the February 19 action ended up catching on: Over thirty cities participated, and thousands of federal workers across different agencies joined in. In New York City, congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fired up a rally of over a thousand federal workers and allies in the frigid cold, explaining that “Elon Musk is not going after efficiency. He’s not going after making these things better for people. . . . He is trying to gut everything that is good in America for his own private profit. This is the culmination of what oligarchy is all about and what oligarchy seeks to do. ”Crucially, the protest was not solely about saving federal workers’ jobs; it also actively sought to involve the broader community under a Save Our Services banner. In line with the “bargaining for the common good” strategy pioneered by unions like the Chicago Teachers Union, the FUN’s approach was premised on an understanding that community support is a pivotal source of leverage for public sector workers and that unions should therefore fight not only for their own members’ interests but also on behalf of the broader public. February 19 showed that significant numbers of federal workers were willing to take a public stance, despite the prevailing climate of fear. No less importantly, the event overnight legitimized the FUN as a significant player in both the labor movement and the broader anti-Trump resistance. Seeking to build from and deepen this first shot of momentum, the FUN decided to launch a public campaign against layoffs. Rather than trying to go it alone, the FUN took on the ambitious goal of uniting all federal unions for the campaign, which would be launched on a March 13 “online mass call. ” Uniting the unions was no easy task, since much of the federal labor officialdom saw FUN activists as threats to their control and leadership. Nevertheless, it turned out that the FUN had just enough momentum, just enough grassroots weight in these unions, and just enough connections with sympathetic AFL-CIO leaders to convince and compel the federal union national leaderships to get on board. The result was a remarkably successful March 13 call, whose speakers included FUN militants, the presidents of all major federal unions and the AFL-CIO, plus sympathetic political figures like Senator Chris Murphy and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. Receiving over two hundred thousand views, the March 13 call constituted a significant breakthrough for a federal workers’ movement in which cross-union coordination was almost unheard-of. “That call really was historic, ” FUN leader Chris Dols recalled to me. “I can’t think of another time when unions representing 99 percent of federal employees did a joint event together. And the funny thing is that it took the FUN to make it happen, when only a few weeks before, some union leaders wouldn’t even respond to our emails. ”Further amping up its ambitions, the FUN next concentrated on getting federal workers to organize their coworkers to join the upcoming April 5 “Hands Off!” anti-Trump protests and to pressure their unions into doing the same. Even after Trump’s Executive Order on March 27 took away collective bargaining for over a million federal workers, most unions were not planning on mobilizing for the April 5 actions. Again, it took the FUN’s initiative to move things in a new direction. On forty-eight hours’ notice, the FUN initiated an emergency organizing call on March 30—the unions jumping on board only at the very last minute—to train thousands of federal workers to talk to their coworkers about their issues, the fears, and the need to take collective action on April 5 and beyond. Not just another online pep rally, the call sought to provide concrete organizing training to federal workers. For instance, a slide titled “Tips for One-On-One Convos” made the following points: —Organizing really just means talking to people!—70/30 rule: Listen more than speak to find the issue they care most about. —Make a concrete ask at the end: “Can you sign up right now for April 5? ”—If they’re eager, ask them to help organize others too. Ultimately, the FUN’s efforts paid off. Large numbers of rank-and-file federal workers went all in to build for April 5, and the AFL-CIO, AFGE, and other federal unions eventually called on their members to participate as well. Up to five million Americans ended up participating in the 1, 400 “Hands Off” actions nationwide. The breadth of the outpouring was a surprise not only to the protest organizers but also to the large number of pundits who had prematurely declared that resistance against the new Trump administration was weaker than the resistance had been four years prior. In fact, there existed a major difference between the first and second anti-Trump resistance movements: The 2025 version was far more antibillionaire, more pro-union, and more concentrated on working people’s day-to-day materials needs. The Federal Unionists Network can rightfully take some credit for this significant—and politically promising—strategic shift. As one FUN chant on April 5 put it, Fight back, fight back against Trump and Musk. Billionaires are killing us!As we go to press, the federal workers’ fight remains in flux. FUN and the federal workers’ movement notched a significant win by contributing to the backlash leading Trump to push Elon Musk out of DOGE in late May. Though the Trump administration remains fully committed to its attacks on federal workers, Musk’s departure from DOGE was a blow to the body’s legitimacy and might the of its more major attacks are On the Supreme the administration a to mass layoffs even though lower had these the FUN and the broader federal labor movement can to this challenge remains to be the of a few the Federal Unionists Network transformed itself from a small group into an organization with of organizing a national and over one thousand federal workers on its national as well as another thousand federal workers who have up to get involved in the FUN and to receive about upcoming February 19 the challenge the FUN has been how to and train an large group of federal workers to go out and organize their the FUN had and was with the challenge of out to a the has had to to a large on the and of federal workers In other the of Trump’s attacks has the in the federal sector of what I call to the red initiated by over as well as the in and up remains the major challenge for the While its growth is and its is FUN members are still only a of the federal Even given the of this there is no that the able to and and fear widespread among federal workers. And the FUN’s growth so far has come from left-leaning of these the FUN has set itself the of its members break activist by actively organizing their coworkers to up to DOGE by that agency heads any more mass layoffs. work could also national unions into more into organizing against the For the FUN to make such an it have to new organizing structures and while simultaneously the to and focus on internal the broader community is another major challenge. 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