“The attack on the federal workforce is not really about the federal workforce, it’s not really about ‘government efficiency,’ it’s really about remaking the civil service, eliminating large parts of the civil service, in the image of the Billionaire Class.”
This was the opening response by Chris Dols when he joined us for an interview on last Saturday’s broadcast to talk about the Trump Administration’s attacks on federal workers. Dols is the President of IFPTE Local 98 — “IFPTE” referring to the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers — as well as Steering Committee for the Federal Unionists Network, and has become somewhat of a public face and voice for federal workers over the last couple of weeks, recently appearing on CNN, MSNBC, and a number of other shows and podcasts, and has been part of a growing movement to fight back against President Trump and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
During our interview, Dols took a few moments to summarize the situation.
“They want to [take] all the worst aspects of small government — deregulation, privatization, they want to eliminate all kinds of safety net programs that kind of raise the bar, whether it’s minimum wage policies or it’s the types of regulations that keep our communities safe to live in, and the air safe to breathe, and the food safe to eat; they want to eliminate all kinds of the safety net protections that the civil service provides, while at the same time implementing the worst aspects of big government: its repressive apparatus, its capacity to deport the weakest people in our society and those who have the fewest rights, undocumented immigrants — they’re really combining the worst aspects of large government and small government.”
Dols went on to explain that he is by no means against the government operating more efficiently, on the contrary he feels it’s desperately needed. But what genuine efficiency looks like and what DOGE is doing are two very different things.
“God knows I think we should be more efficient at regulating businesses like Elon Musk’s, we should be more effective at stopping predatory lenders the way that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was set up to do, the EPA should be more resourced to protect the quality of our air and water and our environment,” he explained (and as most readers are probably already no doubt aware, the CFPB, EPA, and other regulators have been in DOGE’s crosshairs since they initiated these attacks in January).
If the end goal isn’t “efficiency,” then what is it? According to Dols it is to make the working class more exploitable. “This is an attack on government services to immiserate the population and make it easier to be a billionaire in this country and harder to be a worker, because that makes us more exploitable.”
So how are workers fighting back? One particular tool that Dols believes to be crucial is changing the current popular narrative in the media, which is the victimization of federal workers.
“It’s our job to pivot the narrative that I think the media’s been attracted to, which is government workers as just victims of this,” he explained. “Sure, of course government workers are facing mass terminations, and erosion of our labor protections… But the real narrative isn’t about what might happen to me and my family… but it’s really about the broader services. And that’s why the National Day of Action was themed around ‘SOS’: ‘Save Our Services.’”
The “SOS: Save Our Services” National Day of Action Dols refers to was a major event that took place on February 19 where federal workers came together to alert the general public of what these cuts mean and how everyone will be negatively impacted by them. “It’s a beacon call,” said Dols, “it’s a distress signal from the federal workforce to the broader public that this is not just our fight, this is about defending the entire public sphere from the vision of a handful of billionaires who are trying to remake our government and our society in their own image.”
Promotional image from SOS: Save Our Services event. Source: www.actionnetwork.org
According to Dols, the event itself was a success, with more than 30 cities across the Nation participating, and involved partnerships between major unions across the country including the United Auto Workers, which has been outspokenly opposed to Trump since just before the 2024 Presidential Election, as well as staff at central labor councils.
“The outpouring of Solidarity was really incredible,” said Dols.
With the “SOS: Save Our Services” National Day of Action being a success, Dols and the Federal Unionists Network are already using it as a springboard to preparing additional and bigger events.
“Looking ahead, we want to build off of that,” Dols explained, “and continue to provide a place where federal workers see that it’s their unity with each other, building a sectoral strategy — so the entire federal sector actually mobilizing as one — to defend not just our interests as federal civil servants, but also by extension the interests of the broader public in protecting all the services and funding streams that allow Medicaid and Medicare to support home-health aids, and healthcare of our elders, veterans healthcare, regulatory protection of the environment and labor law; like all the things that we do, obviously the broader public has an interest in. We want to build on that message.”
Dols said that they’re working towards mobilizing a fast and massive response across various unions to contend with Musk and these mass terminations. “All of those ‘reductions in the force’ and layoffs need to be rapidly responded to with emergency demonstrations; maybe it’s pickets, maybe it’s press conferences, maybe it’s large rallies; whatever the unions can muster locally with the support of the broader public.”
This mass-mobilization effort already has a name, according to Dols: “We’re calling it the Let Us Work Campaign. We dispute the legality of these layoffs, we contend that this is the executive branch undermining congress’s power of the purse because they mandated that these programs be implemented, and they’re gutting the agency’s ability to actually execute those programs. And so we as the workers who do that work want to protect ourselves and our coworkers who get terminated, and call out the broader public to support us as those things happen.”
According to Dols, they are currently in the middle of training and developing toolkits for local unions and unionists in order to help them develop rapid response capabilities.
“We hope that we can build an escalating campaign to mobilize the public to defend the civil service alongside us as federal unionists,” said Dols. “But we’re not going win this on our own, we’re going to need the broader labor movement and the broader public to stand with us if we’re going to have a chance to stop them.”
For more information on and to support the Let Us Work Campaign, go to www.savepublicservices.com
Watch our full interview with Chris Dols on YouTube: