EDITORIAL
Trump and Musk on the Attack
—Workers Can Defend Themselves

Feb 17, 2025

Donald Trump started his second term by deporting immigrants, trying to make them scapegoats for everything. But it was not only immigrants who he attacked. Trump, along with his billionaire buddy Elon Musk, are trying to take away the jobs of tens and hundreds of thousands of people who work for the federal government.

Trump got rid of the heads of many government departments and agencies. But Trump is just replacing them with his own corrupt cronies. The real attack is on the thousands of people who do the actual work in those departments. Trump and Musk say they will permanently eliminate many of their jobs.

Trump and Musk got rid of some government employees by threatening them, arrogantly telling them that if they didn’t take buyouts they would be laid off and fired without any money. About 75,000 already took the buyouts. Trump and Musk are firing almost all the newest employees, another 200,000-plus workers. Trump and Musk said that, in the future, they will replace only one in four workers who leave.

Nobody voted for Musk to do this. Nobody elected him to do anything. But Musk is the richest man in the world, who got even richer by cutting jobs at Tesla and Twitter. So Trump put him in charge of these massive job cuts as head of the newly-created DOGE, or Department of Government Efficiency. Any worker knows what it means when a boss talks about “efficiency.” It means that he plans to throw some people out of work and then get more work out of fewer people. But in the case of the federal government, these jobs cuts will also mean cuts in public services that the population needs and depends on.

Some of the government jobs that Trump and Musk are trying to cut are people who are nurses and other workers in the V.A. Hospitals. They are people who do mental health care and social work and medical research, jobs that are already short-staffed. They are people who work in agencies that are supposed to monitor workplace safety and pollution and consumer protection—agencies that were already limited, but now will be cut to nothing. And they are people who work in the offices of Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. These jobs have already been drastically reduced, as anybody knows who has waited for hours on the phone or whose check comes late. What happens when more jobs are cut?

Government job cuts didn’t start with Trump and Musk. They have happened under the previous administrations of both parties. Bill Clinton eliminated over 400,000 government jobs during his time as president. As a percentage of total jobs, the number of workers in the federal government today is the lowest it has been since 1940.

Politicians have been cutting government jobs in order to serve the needs and the profits of the capitalist class, the class that includes Trump and Musk. They may claim they are cutting bureaucracy and cutting jobs in order to cut government spending. But they are, in fact, preparing to hand more government money over to their fellow capitalists by lowering taxes on the wealthy. They plan to give the corporate elite even more subsidies and increase military spending.

Some government workers have organized demonstrations and protests against Trump and Musk’s job cuts. But what government workers are up against today is not just Trump and Musk, they are up against the capitalist class and its drive for profits.

Government workers are a small part of a big working class. Millions of other workers are facing the same attacks on their jobs and their standard of living and have the same reason to fight. Workers in the factories and all the other workplaces are in the very center of the whole capitalist economy. That gives the working class power. It is power enough to push aside the Trumps and the Musks and all their smirking arrogance. It is power enough to push aside all of their fellow capitalists and build a society that benefits everyone.