WASHINGTON—Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget Director, Russell Vought, has summed up the administration’s attitude towards federal workers: “We want to put them in trauma.”
A new 42-page report by the AFL-CIO, which contains that Vought quote, could easily apply it to the whole country, federal worker or not, federal program or not, federal service or not. The report terms Trump’s crusade to upend government and its services “purposeful cruelty.”
Vought, a prime author of Trump’s 2024 campaign platform, Project 2025, sneers at federal workers, deriding them as “bureaucrats.” Trump himself, in tweets and orders, calls them part of “the deep state.”
The report, summarizing and extensively quoting findings of the federation’s Department of People Who Work For A Living, paints a dismal picture of devastation the Trump regime has caused nationwide, especially through apparently now-departed Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Trump set up Musk in DOGE and let him set out to massacre programs, agencies, and, economically, people. Indeed, DOGE’s impact—175,000 fired federal workers so far, and counting—has already started to show up in the nation’s jobless data. The AFL-CIO named its department, tongue in cheek, as a criticism of Trump, Musk, and DOGE.
The report goes beyond the hard numbers of worker casualties reported in the mass media—a million workers having their union contracts summarily torn up, 47,000 Transportation Security Officers immediately losing their pact and its protections, and a jobless rate climb in D.C.
The statewide unemployment rate for April, which lags behind the national rate for a month, saw a 0.6% jobless rate increase there. That shot the nation’s capital to the top of the national standings, with an April rate of 5.8%, ahead—or behind—every state. Only 15% of all federal workers are based in the metro D.C. area, which, for statistical purposes, stretches to Baltimore.
But the numbers understate the pain, and the impact of DOGE and its cuts, the report says.
“This is a warning from the workers across the country who keep Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid working, our veterans cared for, and our jobsites safe. If the DOGE agenda keeps moving forward, our communities will pay the price,” said AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler.
“This report gives Congress a clear choice: Stand with the workers who put you in office, or let the Trump administration and an unelected billionaire (Musk) dismantle the essential services millions of hardworking Americans count on.”
Among the report’s findings and examples of pain and trauma:
- Trump created a new tier of workers, Schedule F, top-paid workers who could be fired for no reason at all. He plans to use that axe on 50,000 workers, at least. “The plan seems to be to fire a as many federal workers as possible first before redesignating positions as Schedule F and hiring the loyalist replacements in earnest,” the report says.
Trump’s personal picks in so many top jobs would be a recreation of the spoils system of the Gilded Age, the top union for federal workers, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) says. The government’s deadline for comments to the Federal Register on Schedule F is May 23.
“We’re here because we know it’s not just an attack on our jobs—it’s a coordinated attack on the backbone of our country,” AFGE member Jessica Sweet, of Albany, N.Y., said of Schedule F. “We make the government work for ordinary people—and that scares them. This administration is choosing cruelty over duty.”
- Veterans get really hurt, both in and out of the federal government. Musk and DOGE fired 80,000 Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) workers, depriving them of jobs and veterans they serve of vital cash through disability payments and/or medical care for the aftermath of serious injuries incurred only in battle.
One-quarter of all federal workers are veterans, compared to 5% of the overall U.S. workforce, the report notes. And the VA is one of the most-unionized federal agencies, as National Nurses United represents its registered nurses and the Government Employees (AFGE) represent all the others.
- “The research that comes out of NIOSH” the National Institutes of Occupational Safety and Health, “is something that we rely on,” said Fire Fighters Local 2 member Erik Steinmetz of Chicago.
“There were 873 jobs nationally” in NIOSH “that served over a million firefighters,” researching exposure to toxins blazes unleash, said Steimetz. “That’s gone…. If we’re not safe, we can’t get there to help you. And if we can’t get there to help you, people will die.”
A group of fired NIOSH workers, all AFGE members, accompanied by Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts, hit Capitol Hill on May 21, the day of the report, to lobby hard for restoration of the NIOSH cuts. DOGE cut the NIOSH office in Pittsburgh doing research on coal mine safety—or lack of it—in Appalachia from 222 workers to one.
- Safety and health is already endangered on the job, says Liliana A. Calderon Castillo, the Bricklayers’ health and safety director. DOGE closed down the only respirator certification and approval lab, by forcing the firing of all its workers, she explained. Result: No more certified respirators for workers to wear against coal dust and silica. They’re private sector workers.
“Silicosis is a lung disease caused by inhaling crystalline silica, which is something that I was often exposed to as a bricklayer,” she testified. “Without this critical program, who is to say that the next respirator I wear to help mitigate the hazard is really going to protect me and others, or if there will even be a next one.”
- Workers testified DOGE and Trump “show a fundamental disrespect for civil servants and the essential services they provide to their communities. “Insulting public service work eight days after taking office, the Trump Office of Personnel Management”—the government’s human resources arm—”sent an email to approximately two million federal sector workers encouraging them to resign,” the report reminds readers.
“We encourage you to find a job in the private sector as soon as you would like to do so. The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector,” Trump’s personnel office declared.
“To a billionaire, a public sector worker is less valuable and less productive than a private sector worker,” the report laconically comments. Musk is the billionaire. Multimillionaire Trump’s net worth depends on stock market gyrations affecting his private companies.
- Trump, Musk, and DOGE put profits over people—and programs. That’s produced, among other harms, a massive staff shortage at the Social Security Administration. It produces long wait times in endless lines at remaining SSA offices which seniors have to reach via long trips, if they can make the journeys at all.
“Carlos Ginard, vice president of the Chicago & Midwest Regional Joint Board of Workers United in Illinois, expressed serious reservations about DOGE’s cuts to federal programs, saying, ‘At one point, there was a growing concern that efficiency would be prioritized over empathy. Concern gone—reality here. This is the world we live in now, where profit is now more important than ever, and workers and their safety are expendable.’”
- Trump, Musk, DOGE, and congressional Republicans all demanded all federal workers go back to their offices full time, even though studies show telework and hybrid arrangements are actually more productive.
Of course, sometimes there aren’t any offices to return to, the report notes. DOGE has been cancelling leases on federal office space, leaving workers to double up, move, or quit. The report says what DOGE, Musk and Trump really want is to make working conditions so bad, they will quit.
“Some federal employees’ reporting locations no longer exist,” the report says. “If they [workers] want to keep their jobs, they may have to relocate their families to their new work locations, all for jobs that are perfectly suitable for remote work. The return-to-office order was designed to encourage quitting. While the chaos unfolded, the Trump administration offered employees a way out via its “fork in the road” offer—if you agree to resign effective Sept. 30, you do not need to return to the office.”
- Postal workers have been threatened with privatization.
On the other hand, former Postmaster General Louis DeJoy let DOGE copy and take confidential personnel files, with names, addresses, contact info and Social Security numbers. The IRS did so, too. Musk can then use the data to snoop—and enhance his own riches.
The entire report is posted on the AFL-CIO website.
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