BALTIMORE—One of every eight federal workers, who took oaths to serve the U.S. people and faithfully did so until last year, is now out of a job. The fact that hundreds of thousands of those fired were African Americans whose jobs were critical to the well-being of almost everyone in the U.S. was more than enough reason for the issue to be taken up at the AFL-CIO’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Civil Rights conference in Baltimore last week.
That’s according to Kendrick Roberson, the Government Employees (AFGE) vice president who leads its department dealing with civil rights, women’s rights, and fair practices and civil rights. But the impact goes beyond the sheer numbers, participants in a panel discussion, and from the audience, said during the conference in Baltimore.
The latest employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics backs his statement: In December 2024, the federal government employed 2.413 million workers, not counting contractors or the 600,000 postal workers, a majority of whom are Black. One year later, federal employment was down to 2.145 million.
That’s thanks to President Trump’s executive orders, which have been faithfully—and eagerly—carried out by an executioner of jobs, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, and by chainsaw-wielding multibillionaire Elon Musk and his “Department of Government Efficiency.”
“The orange-haired dude doesn’t think we have rights,” one Southern union local president said about Trump at the January 16 session on the impact of his cuts on the federal workforce and the services they provide.
“Elon Musk had no idea what he was doing,” Roberson commented at the breakout session during the MLK conference. “Massive layoffs have been nonsensical,” such as “firing all the folks at the nuclear facility in Amarillo.” They were the group that gathered and shipped out spent—and highly radioactive—nuclear waste, encased in concrete to secure burial sites in the Mountain States.
And the carnage may not be over. The temporary funding law to keep much of the government going expires at midnight on January 30, raising the possibility of another federal shutdown. At the same time, the law’s ban on Vought’s further firings expires, too.
But the impact is not just numbers, said Roberson and a panel of three workers: One each came from the Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Cancer Institute, and an airport Transportation Security officer. Roberson asked that their names not be disclosed to protect them against Trump retaliation—since another Trump move trashed all their union contracts.
“We collect statistics on why people develop various cancers,” the NCI worker said. “Then we send dollars back to universities and research organizations,” which work on prevention and cures. Trump stopped those grants.
One NCI grant went to a young researcher for the start of a multi-year project discovering why certain cancers strike indigenous people at higher rates than the general population of Arizona. Finding out the “why” could then lead to research on prevention. The researcher was an indigenous person. Now the work won’t get started, much less done.
And who can tell if the grants are legal? Or get the word out about them? Trump and Vought “fired all the lawyers and all the communications people” at the cancer institute, the worker added. “How can you run a government like that?”
“Last year was chaos at the VA,” that worker said, as tens of thousands of people were fired and 35,000 slots were left empty. The result was a drastic decline not in the quality of care for the nation’s veterans—whose ranks are swelled by survivors of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars—but in its frequency.
And while Trump. Vought and Musk canned VA rank-and-file workers, doctors who are upset at the carnage and lack of help, are leaving, too. “A lot of veterans have been calling in to me asking, ‘Do we have a hospital anymore?’” the VA worker said.
“We had long-tenured doctors who didn’t want to work there,” the worker added. “People kept calling up and saying, ‘I’m tired of changing my provider because they kept leaving.’”
The Transportation Security Officer says policy changes occur at the agency “from one day to the next” and often the workers—the airport screeners—are “sucker-punched.”
A federal Judge, he added, “put a stop” to the sudden policy shifts—a statement that drew applause from the crowd.
But Trump’s TSA is looking for any excuse to get rid of people, said one member of the audience, a local president from a southern state. “I got a call from my executive director this morning,” the president said at the January 16 session. “People can’t show up because of the inclement weather,” which also grounded air traffic.
TSA managers asked for documentation of why the workers couldn’t come to their jobs. “I had some people terminated who missed one day” of work “because of the snowstorm” that hit the South. They didn’t come to work, the local president said, “because you could lose your life” driving on hazardous, icy roads. “It’s very frightening.”
Others asked, “‘Am I to get fired because I can’t get my child to day care?’” Day care centers closed due to the snow. “People are really scared—and tired of the uncertainty.”
The union, AFGE, still is there to defend them, even without the contract, the screener said. “A big part of my work is advocacy for my members, who are working their asses off” to ensure people travel safely. But now there’s a mass exodus, and if workers are being replaced, the replacements have little training. And the union keeps filing grievances, even if the VA ignores them, preparing for court suits if needed, Roberson added.
By contrast, the local president said, when the VA contract was in effect, “You get retirement credits and regular paychecks. And you have a right to question a [negative] performance appraisal.”
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