Federal Workers on Earth to Musk, Save Our Services

SAN FRANCISCO (02-20) – Federal employees along with ordinary citizens rallied and protested at the now-infamous Tesla showroom here on February 19 to express their solidarity to stop Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team from gutting federal services through mass layoffs. The nationwide call to action “SOS -Save Our Services day of action!” rallied in defiance to Elon and his minions by demanding that there are “NO cuts to vital services, NO mass layoffs: respect union workers’ contracts” and to “END the funding freeze.”

The large sign-carrying crowd kept business away from the showroom where only one lonely salesman stood idle waiting for customers that didn’t materialize. Since Saturday’s protest, the showroom had one of its large corner windows broken. The sidewalk and entrance to the building were blocked by an angry crowd of recently fired federal civil servants and their supporters who heard from several speakers that were almost inaudible due to the continuous honking of horns by passing vehicles in support of the protesters.

One speaker asked the crowd: “When was the last time you saw a forest fire being put out by a billionaire, or the last time you saw a billionaire answer a telephone.” While another suggested that a massive nationwide labor strike should be in the offing to shut things down to demonstrate the seriousness of the nonsensical massive firings.

Federal employees present represented a wide range of government agencies and departments including FEMA, HHS, NPS, TSA, USDA, VA, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and more. Among them were unions representing both federal and private sector employees. One group, the Asian Pacific Labor Alliance, described themselves as “Angry Asians!” Mixed among the crowd, too, were several members from Veterans for Peace along with members of the Teamsters Union. A sign on a second story window of the building earlier this week that read “We hate him too” was missing.

It was not lost on anyone how these hasty and chaotic actions of DOGE are cutting everything in sight through the firings across the federal government that have resulted in innumerable “callous and dangerous” choices. For the lack of a structural approach including the inability of comprehending institutional knowledge and interworkings of programs, the firings represent a serious threat to the wellbeing of the US and its citizens. Another speaker referred to this by addressing how safe Americans have been due to the work of rank-and-file employees who are now unable to provide the necessary and vital services for public health and safety along with national security due to the shortsightedness of DOGE.

Two examples that defy any sense of logic or knowledge other than “to cut for the sake of cutting” are the layoffs of 350 nuclear weapons program workers in the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) part of the Energy Department and those which took place over this past weekend at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

In the aftermath of the NNSA firings, the government hastily attempted to rehire some of the workers four days later after it was realized that their work is vital to our national interests and security including that of a major almost $800 billion nuclear weapons modernization program, the nuclear stockpile and in managing highly radioactive waste sites. Many of the workers did not return due to the instability of the DOGE purge and concern for instability of their futures at the agency. This entire fiasco greenlights to our adversaries that the US nuclear system is unstable, posing a threat to our national security.

The second massive layoff which took place at the FAA endangers the flying public’s air travel safety by eliminating employees in a department that has had a significantly reduced workforce laboring under trying circumstances that in the past few weeks, unfortunately, has seen several fatal crashes. It makes no sense to negatively impact this vital economic transportation mode by the uninitiated whose callousness of pencil and ruler actuarial cost savings further endangers the flying public.

This, while Trump at a recent press conference parroted Elon Musk’s sound bite, in offering without proof, that Social Security is making payments to “millions and millions of people over 100 years old” both living and dead, including one who is “360-years-old.” While this may make for good press and may further convince those who back his cost-cutting efforts, the reality of Trump World and the facts are not aligned in reality.

In an article published in Politifak, a publication of the Poynter Institute, only “0.84% of all Social Security payments are made in error.” One way of accounting for all matters affecting the department including fraud is through the responsibility of an independent Inspector General (IG) whose position is presently vacant due to the Trump purge on January 26 in the firing of 17 IGs, including the then-acting Social Security IG Hannibal “Mike” Ware.

More specifically, an IG is responsible to prevent and detect waste, fraud, misconduct and abuse relating to their agency’s “programs and operations, and to promote economy, efficiency, and effectiveness” therein. Instead of a career IG, we now have Musk and his DOGE minions who are politically motivated in creating “death by a thousand cuts.”

By his actions, Musk seems to be overly afflicted by that terribly contagious and endemic Washington disease, “Potomac Fever.” President Harry Truman described the affliction saying that “When giving a man a job, some of them grew up with the job and some of them swelled up. And those that swelled up had the Potomac fever. It’s a fever that gets into a man’s blood. He begins to think he is greater than the job and he’s greater than the man that appointed him. About the only remedy that a president has under those circumstances is to fire him and start over.”

Report and photos by Phil Pasquini

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