April 19, 2024 was the 29th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, where an anti-government extremist detonated a bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building downtown Oklahoma City, killing 168 people including children, and injuring 680 others. A third of the building collapsed, and 300 nearby buildings were either damaged or destroyed.
Thirty-five AFGE members who worked in the Department of Housing and Urban Development and 16 in the Social Security offices died that day.
AFGE honors the memory of the union family we so needlessly and suddenly lost. We mourn alongside the families who continue to grieve to this day, and we renew our pledge to protect the health and safety needs of every federal and D.C. government employee.
Government agencies and employees have long been targets of violence. In March 1998, for example, a man with anti-government views attempted to take over a Veterans Affairs office in Waco, Texas. In February 2010, a man who railed against the IRS flew his airplane into an IRS office building in Austin, Texas, killing himself and one IRS employee. In 1996, members of an anti-government group were arrested for plotting to blow up the FBI’s national fingerprint records center in West Virginia where 1,000 people worked. Members of another anti-government group were convicted of surveilling government buildings as potential targets.
Decades of heated, overblown anti-government rhetoric led to these tragedies. When politicians refer to civil servants as “thieves,” “sadists,” “swamp creatures,” “the deep state” and threaten to start slitting government workers’ throats, it dehumanizes everyday workers and can encourage disturbed individuals to commit violence.
With every new instance of hateful rhetoric against our federal government and its workforce, our elected officials and politicians not only tell federal employees that they are not appreciated, but that it’s okay for extremists to attack them, verbally or physically.
As we’re remembering the tragedy that happened in Oklahoma City 29 years ago, we need to do more than just honoring the memory of those we lost. We need to tone down our rhetoric and put measures in place to prevent the next tragedy.