President Donald Trump’s second administration has been defined by its assault on the federal workforce. With Elon Musk at the helm of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Trump administration fired tens of thousands of federal workers, jeopardizing services that working families across the country rely on. Yet the attacks on workers have gone beyond firing public sector workers and will not end just because Musk has left the government.
In fact, many of the Trump administration’s worst actions against the livelihoods and organizing rights of workers, both in the federal workforce and in the private sector, weren’t carried out by Elon Musk or DOGE. Despite the administration’s claim that President Trump is “putting American workers first,” the White House and federal agency heads are trying to end collective bargaining for more than 1 million government workers; hobble the agency overseeing collective bargaining rights for workers in the private sector; and cut the minimum wage for hundreds of thousands of federal contractors. While these anti-worker actions haven’t racked up as many headlines as the administration’s tens of thousands of layoffs, they threaten the foundations of union organizing in the United States and target vulnerable private sector workers.
The above excerpt was originally published in Center for American Progress.
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