Federal Workers Declare Five-Alarm Fires at Agencies
Environmental Protection Agency workers and supporters rallied in July after 139 workers were put on leave for signing a letter to agency head Lee Zeldin and Congress saying the agency’s mission was being undermined. Now some have been fired. Photo: Jenny Brown
Braving retaliation, thousands of federal workers across six agencies have signed open letters charging that their workplaces are being hamstrung or dismantled by the Trump administration. They join federal unionists at dozens more workplaces who have been sounding the alarm to Congress and the public.
When deadly flooding in central Texas killed 135 people in July, “FEMA’s mission to provide critical support was obstructed by leadership who not only question the agency’s existence but place uninformed cost-cutting above serving the American people,” wrote 155 Federal Emergency Management Agency workers on August 25.
A third of FEMA’s staff were either fired or have resigned so far this year.
The unprecedented public letters from workers at FEMA, NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control express outrage and dismay that their work protecting the public is being wrecked by know-nothing administrators and trashed by political lackeys.
HEALTH THREATENED
Over a thousand workers at the Department of Health and Human Services wrote Congress September 3 demanding the resignation of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “Our oath requires us to speak out when the Constitution is violated and the American people are put at risk,” the health workers wrote. “We warn the President, Congress, and the Public that Secretary Kennedy’s actions are compromising the health of this nation.”
That letter came after Kennedy rescinded authorization for the Covid-19 vaccine without explanation. He fired the director of the Centers for Disease Control, Susan Monarez, when she objected. Then federal guards removed three additional top CDC officials from their Atlanta offices on August 28.
National Nurses United wrote in August that Kennedy “has maligned federal health workers, tried to strip HHS workers of their collective bargaining rights, fired experts from CDC’s vaccine advisory committee and replaced them with vaccine critics, cancelled millions of dollars in research into mRNA vaccines [and] spread lies about vaccines.” NNU is the largest nurses union in the U.S.
Biggest Union-Busting Ever
Over six months in office, the Trump administration has engaged in the largest union-busting effort in memory, using executive orders to try to cancel contracts for nearly a million federal workers. In addition, agencies that private sector workers and unions rely on—OSHA, the NLRB—are being gutted. It’s all part of Trump’s billionaires-first agenda.
As a result of the executive orders, agency heads no longer recognize the union for about half a million workers. Other agencies are still in court, or have not acted on the orders yet. At the IRS, for example, the agency stopped collecting dues, but workers still are able to take “official time” to do union work.
The latest executive order came just before Labor Day, stripping workers at six more agencies of union protection.
The administration claims that everyone from janitors to environmental regulators can’t have a union because they are “determined to have as a primary function intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work.”
They claim that these workers are so important to national security that they can’t have a union. Yet they’re not too essential to terminate: The administration has inflicted drastic cuts on nearly every agency.
CORPORATE PROTECTION RACKET
When Trump ordered mass federal firings starting in January, the Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), and other unions representing federal workers sued to stop him. Then Trump turned to attacking the unions, which sued again, charging that they were being targeted as retaliation.
The agencies first to be attacked were those that restrain corporations from doing damage to the public, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
The cuts also target agencies that provide cheap or free public services that for-profit corporations seek to replace, in whole or in part: The Postal Service, the National Weather Service, Veterans Affairs, Medicare, the National Park Service, and Social Security.
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) also issued a strong warning July 28. They called cuts and reorganization of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, including the Food Safety and Inspection Service, “a direct and catastrophic threat to our nation's food supply”—and a threat to farmers and ranchers who rely on the Department.
The reorganization plans seem designed to drive experienced workers out of the agency. Many will leave their jobs rather than “uproot their families for lower pay in unfamiliar locations,” AFGE President Everett Kelley wrote in a letter to Congress. AFGE represents 800,000 government workers, including thousands at USDA.
OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH
When Trump cut 90 percent of the workforce at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, union members pointed out that gutting the Institute is “a blow to every worker in the country.” NIOSH assembles the data that OSHA uses to regulate dangers at work.
“It harms the research on cancer prevention for firefighters, on preventing workplace violence, on the development of exposure limits for new chemicals used in industry,” wrote Micah Niemeier-Walsh, vice president of AFGE Local 3840. Niemeier-Walsh is a member of the Federal Unionists Network, which has been organizing federal unions to fight back collaboratively.
In July, Environmental Protection Agency workers signed a public letter addressed to EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, warning that “this administration is recklessly undermining the EPA mission” and “directly contradicting EPA’s own scientific assessments on human health risks, most notably regarding asbestos, mercury, and greenhouse gases.” EPA faces a 54 percent budget cut.
VA FIGHT BACK
Veterans and veteran health care workers have pressured the Department of Veterans Affairs to back away from some planned cuts. Seventeen thousand workers have been terminated, but the agency has shelved its stated goal of an 83,000-worker reduction in force (around 15 percent). Workers say VA hospitals were already understaffed.
At the Internal Revenue Service, too, the Trump administration has backed off from plans to cut 40 percent of the workforce, though it has terminated at least 7,000 IRS workers (7 percent).
VA health workers charge that the administration is trying to bypass the VA by sending veterans to outside clinics and hospitals. But at a D.C. rally July 6, nurses and federal workers argued that, in the words of Andrea Johnson of NNU, “our outside hospital systems are already overrun.”
“Instead of taking money from the VA [to go to private clinics], hire more people… so the veterans can have those services,” Tampa VA nurse Justin Wooden told the rally.
LOST IN SPACE
In July, hundreds of National Aeronautics and Space Administration workers signed a letter to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, warning that management actions “waste public resources, compromise human safety, weaken national security, and undermine the core NASA mission.”
They denounced “indiscriminate cuts,” writing that “basic research in space science, aeronautics, and the stewardship of the Earth are inherently governmental functions that cannot and will not be taken up by the private sector.”
The Trump administration plans budget cuts that will destroy two currently orbiting climate satellites that are key to assessing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
ILLEGAL RETALIATION
Federal workers have the right to speak out on their own time and in an individual capacity. NASA workers can initiate a formal dissent, and whistleblowers are protected by law.
But after 139 EPA workers signed their letter to EPA Administrator Zeldin, they were forced onto administrative leave for two weeks and put “under investigation” for undermining the goals of the administration.
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At least eight were fired, and some are still appealing their forced leaves. “This was plain and simple retaliation for protected activity to promote a culture of loyalism,” said one EPA worker, who asked for anonymity to speak freely. “Zeldin was on Fox News on July 2 saying how he’ll get rid of anyone who undermines Trump’s agenda.”
Three dozen of the FEMA workers who signed their letter were also put on administrative leave. They have argued that the letter is covered by whistleblower protections, since they are pointing out violations of the law, and that retaliation for that is illegal.
Trump fired FEMA’s acting head in May when he expressed the opinion to Congress that the agency should not be abolished.
LESSONS FROM DISASTERS
At many agencies, improvements that had been spurred by past disasters are now being reversed, workers argue. And that is setting the stage for future tragedies.
FEMA was shown to be ineffectual after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed New Orleans and the nearby Gulf Coast in 2005, killing 2,000 people. Congress passed a law reworking the agency and requiring that FEMA’s administrator have five years of disaster management experience (George W. Bush’s appointee at the time, Michael Brown, had none). The law also bans meddling by Homeland Security.
The FEMA workers’ August 25 letter pointed out that Trump has ignored the law, appointing another inexperienced person to head the agency. Meanwhile, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has been holding up FEMA funds. The administration argues that FEMA’s duties should be devolved to the states.
At NASA, too, a disaster led to reform. Space Shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry in 2003, killing all seven astronauts on board. Workers who believed that protective tiles damaged during ascent would make re-entry dangerous had been intimidated into silence. After that, the agency created stronger protections for workers to speak out.
But now, NASA workers said in their letter to Duffy, “the culture of organizational silence promoted at NASA over the last six months already represents a dangerous turn away from the lessons learned following the Columbia disaster.”
Meanwhile, the administration is claiming that federal workers can no longer have unions, for national security reasons (see box above).
“Not everybody loses their power and their voice at once, it goes step by step,” said Joseph Allen, a member of the Treasury Employees (NTEU) Chapter 66 at IRS in Kansas City. “Everybody’s got to stand in solidarity now.”
Allen said that union efforts are vital: “If they take away the power from the unions, they're going to take away power from management, they're going to take away the agencies. This is to save what we have of our republic.”
