AFGE has launched a new series, Chaos and Corruption Weekly Digest, to document chaos, corruption, and efforts to dismantle our democratic institutions by the Trump administration.
Week 8 saw the economy in chaos while Trump and Musk attacked the Education Department, Environmental Protection Agency, Social Security, and Medicare.
In his 8th week, Trump took steps to dismantle the Department of Education with a planned layoff of half of the workforce, making education less accessible and affordable for millions of school children nationwide. His plan to gut the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) also started to materialize as the agency announced deregulation of dozens of rules that protect public health.
But the White House was also in damage control mode after facing an outrage prompted by Musk’s interviews about eliminating Social Security and Medicare.
Both Musk and Trump claimed millions of dead people are getting checks, but the Social Security Administration’s own data says otherwise.
Social Security and Medicare are popular programs Trump repeatedly said on the campaign trail he would not touch. But to get enough money to pay for tax cuts for billionaires and corporations, they are now floating ideas to cut Americans’ hard-earned benefits.
It’s giving déjà vu. Trump told voters during his first presidential campaign that he would not touch these programs, but his budget cut all of them.
While the American people are suffering either from his extreme policies or being fired by him, Trump turned the White House into a Tesla showroom, praising Musk’s cars and urging the American people to buy one.
Musk had a rough week as people around the world expressed their anger and boycotted his company. As Tesla sales plummeted, Tesla shares also plunged more than 15% on March 10, losing $16 billion in one day. This brings the total decline to more than 50% in less than three months. As the richest man in the world, Musk thinks he can do whatever he wants, but it’s the people that have real power.
The American people took notice. A new poll shows they do not approve of Trump’s many actions: 61% disapprove of his tariffs while 56% disapprove of his handling of the economy. Independents, in particular, are disturbed by what they see – 71% disapprove of his tariffs, 69% are concerned he’s cutting too many important government programs, and 66% think he’s too extreme.
Even judges felt the need to speak up. Independent judges appointed by both Democratic and Republican politicians are raising the alarm about threats to democracy under the Trump administration.
Here’s a quick recap of Trump’s attacks in his 8th week in office and how these actions hurt federal workers and the American people they serve. As we’ll never let his attacks go unchallenged, we also threw in some victories.
March 13: Agencies faced Trump’s deadline to submit their Reduction in Force (RIF) plans. If implemented, the American people will face long lines and wait times and cuts to the government services they rely on. We came together as a society to find solutions to common problems each of us individually cannot solve. Diseases, air pollution, food safety, road safety, defense, natural disasters are just a few examples of why we have our government. Gutting our government like Trump and Musk are doing is gutting ourselves and future generations.
March 13: In a major victory for AFGE and federal workers, a judge ordered the Trump administration to reinstate probationary employees fired at six agencies. The judge said that the mass firing “is based on a lie” and that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) didn’t have the authority to order it. AFGE added other agencies to the lawsuit and filed a motion to extend the order to cover these agencies.
March 13: AFGE and allies filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration for unlawfully and unilaterally terminating a negotiated union contract, which protects approximately 47,000 Transportation Security Officers (TSOs). These TSOs voted to join AFGE to improve their working conditions so that they could focus on their job protecting the flying public, but the agency decided to take away their collective bargaining rights using fabricated claims, making clear this action has nothing to do with efficiency, safety, or homeland security.
March 13: A judge in Maryland ordered the administration to temporarily reinstate fired probationary workers and halt its planned reductions in force (RIFs) at 18 agencies, including the Department of Education that announced it would fire half of its staff. The lawsuit was filed by state attorney generals.
March 12: Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency appears to relinquish its mission of protecting the environment when it announced a sweeping plan to revoke nearly three dozen regulations designed to protect the American people from air, land, and water pollution. Polluters are about to have a field day while the American people’s health is in jeopardy.
March 12: Trump’s tariffs on global steel and aluminum imports prompted the European Union and Canada to retaliate with their own tariffs on American products ranging from beef to motorcycles. His trade war with our own allies has caused damage to the U.S. economy as fear of recession grew.
March 12: Rep. John Larson, D-Conn., called out his Republican colleagues on the House Ways and Means Committee for blocking Musk’s testimony on his attempt to privatize Social Security.
March 12: Besides announcing a mass layoff of workers who provide Social Security benefits the week before, the Social Security Administration (SSA) was considering cutting phone services that 73 million retirees and those with disabilities rely on. It abandoned the plan after the Washington Post’s report on it prompted an outrage.
March 11: The Education Department announced it is cutting its staff by about half, a move that will be damaging to American children and schools across the country.
March 11: Trump is about to gut the Justice Department’s corruption unit, slashing staff from 30 prosecutors to about 5. From disbanding a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) team that fights foreign threats to our elections to firing staff investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the president is actively destroying the department from within.
March 11: AFGE and allies filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration for ordering USAID employees to shred and burn documents.
March 11: A judge ruled Trump overstepped his constitutional authority when he halted almost all spending on foreign aid administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) as part of his plan to abolish the agency. The judge ordered him to pay $2 billion it owed but did not go as far as directing him to revive the cancelled contracts.
March 11: Trump’s acting head of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) rejected a court order to appear at a hearing to be cross-examined after AFGE and allies filed a lawsuit against the administration for illegally firing probationary employees.
March 11: Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger said he was preparing a lawsuit to protect 200,000 probationary employees from getting fired when Trump fired him.
March 11: White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt spent the day gaslighting the American people, calling trump’s tariffs “a tax cut for the American people.”
March 10: Musk targeted for cuts Social Security and other benefit programs that the American people have paid into and rely on.
“Most of the federal spending is entitlements,” Musk said. “That’s the big one to eliminate.”
March 10: In a legal setback for Trump and Musk, a judge ordered DOGE to release records about its operations, which the judge said were being carried out with “unusual secrecy.”
March 10: AFGE and allies filed a motion for summary judgement to immediately block the Trump administration from shutting down USAID. The group argued that facts are not contested and so a trial is not needed.
March 9: Trump refused to rule out recession as a result of his trade war with allies.
March 9: The U.S. was added to a global human rights watchlist over declining civil liberties.
“The Trump Administration seems hellbent on dismantling the system of checks and balances which are the pillars of a democratic society,” said Mandeep Tiwana, Interim Co-Secretary General of CIVICUS.
AFGE has partnered with other labor unions and allied organizations to form Rise Up: Federal Workers Legal Defense Network.
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AFGE and other AFL-CIO and unions representing workers across private and public sector industries sued the Trump administration over its dismantling of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service.
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Week 13 saw Trump ignoring the Supreme Court’s order, intimidating lawmakers, threatening universities, and floating the idea of sending U.S. citizens to foreign prisons.
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