Editorial note: The following was sent over to our publication from a verified federal worker outraged by the onslaught of illegal maneuvers being engaged by the Trump Administration. The opinions and analysis expressed represent the opinions of the author. Washington Socialist is a quarterly publication produced by the Metro DC chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, produced by and for the working-class of DC, Maryland and Virginia.
Published 2/6/2025
THERE IS A COUP taking place in the United States right now. It is happening with dizzying, calculated speed, and we (the general populace and our elected representatives) are doing little to stop it. The goal of the Trump Administration is to flout existing regulation and Congressional oversight of government agencies, in effect centralizing power around his White House. My intent with this piece isn’t to collate all of the evidence of this, but rather explain what I have observed as a federal employee, and plead for collective action.
In the initial stages of this coup, there was a lack of coherent media coverage explaining what is happening. This is, of course, by design. The aim of the Trump administration is to overwhelm us and shock us into inaction. It’s currently working. There is nearly limitless coverage of certain issues — tariffs, deportations, plane crashes — and for good reason, but there was little clarification on the bigger picture to the average person, and very few news outlets willing to even use the word “coup” outside of an opinion piece. Since initially writing this, news coverage has improved, but there is still a dulled response. If the media cannot or will not raise the alarm, and if people don’t come together quickly, fascism will rapidly take a deeper, more insidious hold on our institutions.
I am a federal bureaucrat of little importance. I am not in high-powered meetings and I do not have high security clearance. I do not have special knowledge of current events, only my own observations. It’s hard to fully explain everything that I have witnessed in the last couple of weeks in part because there has been so much happening so quickly, but also because it’s tedious to explain our inner workings. The memos, the emails, the oversight - it’s all quite dry, and yet it has been critical context in the last couple weeks as norms and laws have been repeatedly broken.
Following his inauguration, Trump signed 36 executive orders, many drawn straight from Project 2025. These included many of questionable legality. These orders, signed en masse, were designed to sow chaos, disorient the public, and overwhelm the media. This worked extremely well. Several of these orders took aim at career civil servants like myself - people you know. People in cubicles with dying desk plants who ensure you and your neighbors have access to Medicaid, food stamps, and federal student loans (plus many harmful initiatives, although much related to the military and “national security” has been exempt from this onslaught). A cascade of orders, memos, and other official communications referred to us as, among other things, as unproductive, disloyal, and (a personal favorite) a “national embarrassment” for using telework and accommodation options afforded to us since 2010. Our job flexibilities are slowly being stripped in an attempt to force people out of their jobs by a variety of mechanisms - resignation and termination chief among them.
While career federal employees were being bombarded with insulting public messaging that questioned our skills and loyalty, we also began receiving suspicious emails claiming to originate from the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM in the first week of the new administration. This office is the driest of dry government work; it functions in some ways as a government-wide HR, processing hiring documents, personal information, and other position data generated by the agencies themselves. Are you bored? It SHOULD BE boring, but unfortunately, boredom is a luxury no longer afforded to us.
Approximately 2 million federal employees received emails directly from OPM. These messages were unusual because OPM never directly emails us, instead generating formulaic paperwork updates through an electronic portal or issuing memos cascaded through leadership at each agency. The emails were brief, strangely informal, and requested that staff reply directly to confirm receipt. Even newer feds could discern that these messages were not written by someone familiar with governmental functions. Slowly, agency by agency, our IT departments confirmed that the emails were legitimate and that we should respond as directed. What we whispered and wondered was why, exactly, someone untrained and unvetted was able to directly contact the entire federal workforce, what other information they had, and what their purpose was. Around this time reports began circulating that Elon Musk was on-site at OPM.
Within a few days of the odd OPM emails, the vast majority of federal employees got another email, this time with the subject line “Fork in the Road.” In this message, our loyalty and competency were again called into question, and we were offered 8 months of paid leave if we resigned by Thursday, February 6th. For the sake of brevity, I won’t go into detail; but there is absolutely no legal basis for this offer due to existing laws and previous court rulings. The “offer” in and of itself was not made in good faith, and was designed to capitalize on fear and confusion. Luckily, this became clear to the vast majority of federal employees almost at once. Overnight, mellow bureaucrats became incensed and, to my delight, somewhat radicalized against what was happening around us. On federal subreddits, cries of “hold the line, do not resign,” “come and take it,” and reiteration of people’s oaths to uphold the constitution became commonplace and have only grown louder as we approached the resignation deadline.
Unfortunately, resignation deadline or not, government employees are already being purged at alarming rates so that entire agencies can be collapsed, privatized, or replaced with loyalists. USAID has already fallen to this, and the Department of Education appears to be next. “Officials” tasked with the purge are also reported to be on-site at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), one of the agencies most responsible for tracking climate change data. In disrupting federal workflows and protocol, there is a real threat to basic functioning of the government. If this is sustained, there is a real risk of basic government functions (processing benefit payments, transferring cash to states, operation of government communications, etc) collapsing as a result of this interference, as happened just last week when Medicaid payment sites went temporarily down.
Federal unions have demonstrated the importance of collective power in the past few weeks, creating some of the strongest pushback. But many federal workplaces are not unionized, mine included. Information remains scarce. Protests have thankfully increased. (The Wednesday protest at the Department of Labor, which intimidated Musk’s adjutants out of an onsite meeting, demonstrates the importance and power of mass mobilization.) Yet retaliation against high-level officials who are resisting this agency infiltration is ramping up. And I still haven’t even really gotten to Musk…
What is hopefully clear at this point is that Elon Musk and his “Department of Government Efficiency”, or DOGE, have fully seized OPM and are directly responsible for the purges, the bogus “resignation” offer, and ongoing pressures to resign. He has been designated a “Special Government Employee,” a position I am not familiar with but apparently means that he is able to operate without any vetting or a background check, as can his staff - a handful of people in their early 20’s who Musk pulled from OpenAI and SpaceX. Per an anonymous plea from an OPM career employee, Musk and company have reportedly moved beds into the building and installed their own unsecured email server to facilitate the emails I described above.
What I want to make absolutely clear about on all of this is that a billionaire with lucrative foreign business ties has bought access to highly sensitive employment and tax data of millions of people. There is a clear blueprint for what happens next. The resignation offer that feds received carries the same “Fork in the road” subject line that Musk sent to his twitter employees two years ago, and doxxing has already begun. Thus far the targets have mostly been higher-level federal employees who have resisted Musk’s purges, or those with DEIA backgrounds, but over time the doxxing will surely cascade down against anyone who speaks out. There is not an attempt to hide this - Musk is openly posting threats on Twitter and currently playing in our lives, institutions, and processes for his personal enrichment. Over the last 10 days I have had countless conversations with my colleagues about our fear - not for the clear risk to our jobs, but for our safety.
If the risks posed by Musk’s unchecked, unvetted, unsecured interference in our federal workforce are not enough, Musk has also seemingly been granted an uncertain amount of access to the Treasury’s federal payment systems. This means he can now directly review, and likely influence, the finances of a multitude of critical government functions. I cannot emphasize enough - this is not normal.
This is an enormous concern for national security and the data privacy of millions of people - not just federal employees. A higher-up at the Treasury resigned in protest of Musk’s influence, indicating some resistance, but his takeover was still allowed to take place and barely hampered by the loyalist-staffed Department of Justice. (On Wednesday, DOJ agreed to a proposed order that would largely prohibit the Treasury from sharing sensitive financial data, but it’s unclear if this directive will really be followed by an Administration so clearly willing to flout rules and norms.) Again, this means that a billionaire with a multitude of foreign interests has paid his way to access deeply critical data to the innermost functioning of our government. We should expect corporate influence in our basic government functions to build from here, including the abolition or privatization of core services in the name of efficiency. Doxxing is now, or will soon be, a real threat to all of us, regardless of our relationship to federal employment.
The only place I am able to get useful news on the mechanisms of the coup have been from Reddit, of all places, and it takes a lot of time and effort to stay informed. Many people who are a step removed from what is happening are simply not expending this energy: why would they dig into the minutia of federal employees? Acronyms and in-speak make the information even harder to understand to external people.
This is where journalists should step in. Although the media has been bolder in covering this coup over the past week, that this focus was largely kickstarted by small blogs and outlets indicates a wider blind-sight among national news organizations. As a result, many people outside of the federal government simply do not understand the severity of what is going on. The message of panic from the DC rank-and-file was slow to cause public outcry, but concerted messaging from DC-area locals have changed things over the past few days. Protests have been kicking off in DC over the past week and it appears that protest movements have begun nationally as well. But there are still people looking away and we cannot allow that to happen. Fascism moves fast once it is out in the open, and we are losing critical time due to people feeling overwhelmed and apathetic.
Within the average government employee and the public, there is still a deep belief that the law will protect the norms, functions, and institutions of our government. Unfortunately, this belief is misplaced. It is absolutely critical to remember that laws are nothing but social contracts - if those in power agree that the law does not apply, and no one speaks out to enforce accountability to the law, it functionally does not exist. The only way that the violation of that contract can be rectified is by massive public outcry and collective action. We must band together to fight this. Federal employees are trying, but we are besieged on all sides. We cannot do this alone. We need you to resist these illegal maneuvers with us.
Call your representatives and demand oversight and action to stop Trump: There are few illusions that federal power will stop this, however indicating opposition to Trump’s proposals is the least someone can do. Many federal workers live inside Washington, DC and so we do not have a senator or representative to support us. Please, in your calls reiterate support for DC autonomy and statehood. Find your rep in the House here. Find your rep in the Senate here.
Protest: Protest strategically and consistently. It is best to join a local group so that you can coordinate tactically. For those of us in DC, the Defend DC coalition and Free DC are trusted local resources in coordinating response. Coordinating with others is essential for making sure protests have impact in both driving media narratives or preventing the government from initiating illegal maneuvers.
Support the unions: Federal worker unions have been on the frontlines in coordinating protests in support of workers and filing lawsuits against these illegal maneuvers. Federal workers should be making a proactive push to engage and participate in their union, join their union, or explore forming one. For those in unions, especially workers with public-sector bargaining units, make sure your unions are discussing this and are coordinating, where legal, to support workers. The AFL-CIO has also launched a new site - The Department of People Who Work for A Living - as a resource designed to coordinate resistance to DOGE and Trump’s anti-worker pushes.
Know your rights: For federal and civil workers, it’s especially important you know your rights. Civil Service Strong is an excellent resource, as are unions with federal sector bargaining rights.
Educate yourself and others: Stay up-to-date on news on this by following trusted sources. Share and verify information with your friends, family and co-workers to ensure accuracy. In talking with others, emphasize the importance of the federal workforce and clarify the Trump Administration’s aims to undermine the democratic process at the direction of unaccountable billionaires.
Pace yourself: There is a lot going on, and some people may be rightly afraid or scared of what’s happening. These feelings are normal - learning to balance current events with resistance is a difficult task, but essential. Rest, sleep and think.
Do not look away: Please, do not look away.
