EXCERPT - Courage or Complicity? How Veterans Are Responding to the Attack on Democracy
Written by SP Editor
“Silence is No Longer an Option”:
How Federal Workers Found Their Voice
By Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon
During the first few months of 2025, life and work in federal office buildings in Washington, DC, was often interrupted by a new lunchtime ritual.
Officials and staffers of AFL-CIO unions representing federal workers would arrive outside an agency headquarters with neatly printed signs and approved messages. Worried civil servants would join them at noon, to mill about, share the latest alarming rumors, and brandish the placards handed to them. Union PR people would buttonhole the press and distribute media advisories.
Often, the big news of the day involved yet another labor lawsuit related to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and its engineering of mass dismissals, federal agency defunding, and dysfunctional reorganizations.
Top labor officials and their putative friends on Capitol Hill would show up like clockwork to deliver reassuring rally rhetoric (or leave statements of support in their absence). One such supporter was Senator Richard Blumenthal from Connecticut. He and 20 other Democrats had recently voted to confirm right-wing Republican Doug Collins as President Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).
A former Congressman from Georgia and past supporter of VA privatization, Collins wasted no time doing DOGE’s dirty work at the VA. This meant that Blumenthal then had to troop down from Capitol Hill and speak in defense of now endangered members of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) who work at the VA.
During this unsettling period inside the Beltway, Democrats like Blumenthal seemed most comfortable training their fire on the evil genius of Elon Musk. Not busy enough running Tesla, Starlink, SpaceX, and X, the world’s wealthiest man took three months out of his busy schedule to blow up as much of the federal government as he could, with a network of tech industry helpers.
Musk soon left town, after a predictable spat with Trump. But DOGE—and the Heritage Foundation blueprint for dismantling the “regulatory state” (aka Project 2025) —remained a major influence on a longer-lasting crew of Republican appointees. Their goals included eliminating collective bargaining by unionized federal workers and increasing their own ranks from four thousand to fifty thousand by stripping many jobs of civil service protections and turning them into “at-will” positions.
No United Front?
Despite representing hundreds of thousands of workers suddenly under unprecedented attack, AFL-CIO unions long accustomed to dealing with federal agencies who behaved differently were slow to develop a coordinated response. And they seemed unwilling to take the fight against President Trump to cities and states across the country where most federal workers live.
What explains that reluctance? As forty-year-old Mark Smith, a Canadian-born VA occupational therapist, told us at the time, his own union, the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE), was “overly siloed” and top-down.
Instead of looking for ways to unite all workers in the federal sector, top labor officials and staff like to promote their own organizational brand. They cultivate separate connections to politicians and agency managers and focus on their different local or national bargaining units, which often lack strong locals and high levels of voluntary dues-paying membership.
To save money—in the face of cascading legal threats—some national unions did agree to share the mounting cost of DOGE-related litigation and cooperate on courtroom strategy. Like Smith in California, Colin Smalley (an Army Corps of Engineers geologist who led International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers [IFPTE] Local 777 in Chicago) and Chris Dols (then president of IFPTE Local 98 in New York City) decided this limited form of cooperation was not good enough to meet the challenges of the moment.
Mounting organizational threats--that would soon include an illegal presidential attempt to end collective bargaining by AFGE, NFFE, IFPTE, and other unions—required a much more militant, creative, grass roots response.
Fortunately, these co-founders of what has become the Federal Unionists Network (FUN) first connected with each other, via a WhatsApp chat, prior to a face-to-face meet up at the national Labor Notes conference in April 2024. At that gathering in Chicago two years ago, they met and also compared notes with foreign trade unionists. As Smalley recalls, some of them were already dealing with “autocratic and, at times, even fascist regimes, which exploit public employees as scapegoats.”
With little national union headquarters encouragement and few resources, Smith, the new president of NFFE Local 1 in San Francisco, and other FUN activists called for a nationwide “day of action” on February 19, 2025.
In an email blast issued in the name of the rank-and-file “nurses, scientists, park rangers, protectors of our country, researchers, and attorneys who serve our communities every day,” they urged workers around the country to plan local events to protest federal funding freezes, the threatened elimination of three hundred thousand jobs, and the disruption of vital services and their further privatization by Trump.
”If we speak out together,” FUN declared, “we can make it clear to the public why Trump’s attack on our jobs is designed to make all of our lives worse.”
A Bottom-Up Initiative
Federal workers, along with labor and community allies, responded to FUN’s appeal in thirty-five cities, including New York City, where one thousand protesters gathered in Lower Manhattan’s Foley Square to hear speakers like longtime VA defender, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
In San Francisco, outside an already much-picketed Tesla dealer at the corner of Van Ness and O’Farrell, a crowd of three hundred assembled, including members of Smith’s own VA Medical Center local union. They were joined by staffers of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Board (CFPB), the Park Service, Army Corps of Engineers, National Labor Relations Board, the General Services and Social Security Administration, and the US Departments of Education and Housing and Urban Development.
CFPB attorney Hai Binh Nguyen was one of many participants eager to tell the press about their commitment to serving the public. “I think it’s really rare,” she said, “that we get to be in a place that has a really amazing mission, which is to make the market fair and protect everyday consumers.” She and her coworkers were there to protest a stop-work order issued by the Trump administration, which, in her office, immediately disrupted pending investigations of consumer fraud.
Members of the FUN-organized crowd chanted and cheered, while hoisting banners and hand-lettered signs: One placard read: “Federal Workers: Here to Serve, Not Afraid and Not Leaving,” which pretty well summed up the sentiment of the group. In his rally speech, Mark Smith reminded everyone of who does the real work of the federal government.
“I’ve never seen a billionaire carry the mail,” the NFFE local president said. “I’ve never seen a billionaire put out a forest fire. I’ve never seen a billionaire make sure people get their Social Security checks on time. I’ve never seen a billionaire answer a phone call from a suicidal veteran on the VA crisis line.”
Belated Official Backing
On the eve of FUN’s well-coordinated solidarity activity, the DC-based headquarters of NFFE, the National Treasury Employees Union, and the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) endorsed its 2025 “Day of Action.” The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal worker union, and National Nurses United, which represents fifteen thousand VA nurses, did not co-sponsor.
Yet, less than a month later, the national presidents of AFGE, NFFE, and IFPTE, along with AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler, were all eager participants in a live-streamed, FUN-sponsored event, “Save Our Services,” that drew more than twenty thousand views.
In a nod to FUN’s catalytic role as a cross-union formation favoring direct action, Shuler assured her listeners, “We’re filing the lawsuits, yes, we’re fighting back in Congress, but most importantly, we’re mobilizing in the streets.” In April and June 2025, FUN activists around the country formed highly visible contingents in the much bigger and broader “Hands Off ”and “No Kings Day” demonstrations, organized by labor allies, that drew millions of supporters.
The AFL-CIO began recruiting and training one thousand lawyers in forty-two states to serve as a Federal Workers Legal Defense Network. These volunteers provided legal advice and support for individual employees who faced adverse action by their agencies but still retained civil service rights and protections.
AFGE became more proactive in signing up new members and briefly reached a new all-time high membership of 321,000. Such recruitment efforts were succeeding, the union said, because more workers want “to have a voice at work and fight efforts to undermine the federal government and democracy.”
A Tradition of Collective Action
All federal worker unions have long operated on the “open shop” basis mandated by federal law. But, under Trump 2, workers who signed up to become members soon had to pay their dues via alternative methods like AFGE’s “E-dues” collection systems, because payroll deduction of dues was discontinued.
In the wake of the president’s executive orders, repudiating labor agreements covering nearly one million workers in August 2025, unions without much recent history of membership mobilization also had to adapt to other adverse conditions. Those included not being able to provide day-to-day representation in their usual on-site fashion, from office space—and with lost-time pay-- provided by the employer.
Labor historian and Georgetown University professor Joe McCartin observed, “The sudden conversion of federal workers to what was effectively at will status and the simultaneous termination of their bargaining rights puts them in the same position as the vast majority of private sector workers who lack union representation.” On the positive side, McCartin speculated that this might reawaken “a long dormant tradition of collective action among otherwise seemingly docile federal workers.”
FUN led the way in warning that the system of labor-management relations familiar to today’s federal workers was reverting, for the time being, to its condition before 1962. That’s when the Kennedy administration first granted collective bargaining rights, albeit with more limited scope than in the private sector, to head off growing unrest among federal workers. As McCartin notes, from 1956 to 1981 they staged more than one hundred illegal work stoppages of varying durations. These culminated in the nationwide air traffic controllers strike in 1981, which led to 12,000 summary dismissals by then President Ronald Reagan.
Acting Like a Union
To navigate their own uncharted terrain, FUN organizers became active in the legislative/political campaign to restore bargaining rights, while continuing to “educate workers about their remaining legal protections.” On the first front, FUN helped stage a January 2026 rally on Capitol Hill, with participation from most federal unions, to push for Congressional passage of the Protect America’s Workforce Act. Even twenty House Republicans backed this proposed restoration of collective bargaining in the federal sector, which did not have sufficient support in the Senate.
FUN also coached federal workers on how they could come together, in the meantime, and “act like a union” in their workplaces without formal bargaining. A guide prepared by Colin Smalley and distributed by the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, recommended that workers respond to abuses of management authority as follows:
“Speak out: get creative with whistleblowing. A well-scripted ‘march on the boss’ or a petition are great ways to take collective action that’s protected by the Whistleblower Protection Act, so long as they disclose any violation of law, regulation, rule, or policy, or an abuse of authority.”
In an on-line FUN tutorial called “How to Be a Union No Matter What the Boss Says,” Jason Freeman, a campaign coordinator for SEIU, encouraged participants to use “administrative grievance procedures.” Those remained in effect even though front-line federal agency supervisors were happy to ignore any union negotiated grievance process, while Trump’s national-level labor contract cancellation was still being litigated in federal court.
As Chris Dols told fellow FUN members: “Everybody needs to become an organizer now.... If you’re a federal employee and you don’t know who your union is, get involved with the FUN; we’ll help you figure it out. If you don’t have a union, we’ll help you learn how to organize one.”
Navigating the Shutdown
In the fall of 2025, millions of Americans also had their own everyday lives disrupted by the longest-ever federal government shutdown. For forty-three days, the Democratic minority in the Senate held out for a deal with Donald Trump that would have shielded everyone utilizing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) from impending private insurance industry price hikes.
This laudable goal—made complicated by the costly and byzantine structure of the ACA— required much financial sacrifice by federal workers and the citizens they serve. About 780,000 federal employees had to work without pay; another 670,000 were furloughed entirely.
Food costs increased for the 1.2 million veterans living in households whose low income qualified them (and 41 million other Americans) for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. Also going without food stamps during the shutdown were the families of an estimated twenty thousand active-duty service members who depend on SNAP.
Furloughed Park Service worker James Jones, an army vet who became active in FUN, reported that even his MAGA friends and neighbors in North Carolina were telling him, “I didn’t vote for this.”
Unfortunately, AFGE national president Everett Kelley proved overly willing to throw in the towel too soon. He publicly demanded that Congress pass a spending bill without any agreement on future ACA funding.
Seeing newspaper headlines like “Top Federal Workers’ Union Breaks with Democrats Over the Shutdown” really riled up rank-and-file members of AFGE, other federal workers in FUN, and even labor endorsed U.S. Senators like Mark Kelley and Ruben Gallego from Arizona. As Gallego reminded Kelley, “We need to be looking out for the 24 million Americans, including the nearly 500,000 Arizonians, who will see their premiums double or lose health care coverage altogether if we don’t address ACA subsidies.”
No Bad Budget in Our Name
That view was echoed in a September 29, 2025, open letter, titled “No Bad Budget in Our Name,” issued by FUN and twenty-five sponsoring federal local unions. The signers implored Democratic leaders in Congress to continue “fighting against the centralization of executive power and for the long-term survival of critical federal services, even if that means allowing the government to temporarily shut down.”
In AFGE, several hundred of its local officers, shop stewards, and retirees circulated a petition sharply critical of Kelley’s call for “an unconditional end to the shutdown that ignores the voices of AFGE’s membership and the historic opportunity that we have to press Congress to protect the interests of working people.”
Among the signers was FUN member Mae apGovannon, an AFGE steward in Portland, Oregon. As apGovannon told the press: “I was shocked when I read President Kelley’s statement. We were helping each other hold on without pay as long as we could.... We saw the shutdown as a way of highlighting that we all stand together until we win, or we suffer together. Now, it’s like our continued sacrifice was ignored—and those of us who aren’t billionaires were sold out again.”
Two days before the shutdown ended, Kelley criticized FUN, behind closed doors, at an AFL-CIO executive council meeting. He complained that these media-savvy internal dissidents were undermining AFGE’s own official position. But, as Paul Osadebe, an AFGE steward and FUN steering committee member reminded the media, Kelley’s cave-in did “nothing to prevent the ongoing destruction of public services and jobs.”
To counter an otherwise demoralizing set back, FUN sponsored a “Nationwide Week of Service and Action” in late November, 2025. It built upon the grassroots popularity of the federal worker food pantries, social mixers, and other forms of solidarity and mutual aid that emerged during the shutdown. FUN volunteers planned to organize further town hall meetings, local relief projects, public demonstrations, and accountability sessions with elected officials.
An AFGE Member Killed
In late January of this year, FUN also reacted quickly after the Border Patrol fatally shot AFGE member Alex Pretti ten times in the back—a particularly brutal way to reduce head count at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center. The thirty-seven-year-old nurse was off duty at the time. He was peacefully filming federal agent activity, when he came to aid of a female protester who had just been pepper-sprayed. She was Pretti’s last patient.
The White House used the fact that Pretti was legally carrying—but not brandishing—a concealed weapon to smear him as a “domestic terrorist” who planned to “murder federal agents.” That pretext for his summary execution—after he had been restrained— unraveled pretty quickly. Pretti’s death became a key “tipping point” in the ongoing popular struggle against the ICE “surge” in the Twin Cities and elsewhere.
In Washington, DC, AFGE President Everett Kelley called for an independent investigation into the killing of “a fallen brother from AFGE Local 3669,” the “patriotic IUC nurse” who had “devoted his life to serving America’s veterans.” Kelley also demanded the resignation of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who was sacked soon thereafter.
According to the AFGE president, Noem’s masked and heavily armed underlings in Minneapolis put “lives at risk”—as she had done previously, with nationwide impact, via her “sustained attacks” on AFGE members providing airport security at the Transportation Safety Agency and disaster relief at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. (Left unmentioned was how Kelley planned to deal, then or later, with his National Border Patrol Council, a pro-Trump AFGE affiliate which some AFGE rank-and-filers want kicked out of the union.)
AFGE’s organizational rival as a representative of VA nurses— National Nurses United—responded by demanding “the immediate abolition of ICE” as a “violent, racist, and lawless agency that poses a dire public health threat.” They then organized a “Week of Action in Honor of Alex Pretti” that was not limited to other federal workers. Instead, NNU tried to engage two hundred thousand unionized nurses nationwide—including those in our hometown, Richmond, California, where Kaiser RN’s reminded their bosses that if “you take on one of us, you take on all of us.”
AFGE headquarters issued its own call for a national “Day of Remembrance” for Alex Pretti on February 1, 2026. This led to two dozen local vigils, including one at VA headquarters in Washington, DC. AFGE President Kelley flew all the way to Minneapolis to personally address VA workers on their day off. Always batting cleanup for—and going deeper than—the national union officialdom, FUN distributed what it called a “Justice for Alex Toolkit.”
This workplace solidary guide included “a sample meeting agenda and facilitation guide to bring co-workers together to plan vigils and other actions.” Its emphasis, per usual, was not just on displays of grief and anger, but longer term organizing to build power in any federal workplaces temporarily stripped of union contracts or facing the threat of dismantlement.
Since March of this year, that situation has changed for the better, because a federal judge ordered the restoration of union contracts covering 320,000 VA workers; that Trump Administration action was motivated the court found, by AFGE’s “history and frequency of vocally opposing changes to labor policies.”
As FUN members headed, in early June, for their biggest ever national gathering, just before the 2026 Labor Notes conference in Chicago, the group claimed an activist core of nine hundred federal workers, thousands of others who support its activities, and a growing list of “regional hubs.”
In addition, FUN now has a supportive network of experienced organizing “mentors” with Labor Notes connections. The group has also raised enough money to deploy full-time helpers with first-hand experience dealing with Trump Administration attacks on their own federal agencies.
Among them has been Alissa Tafti, who led AFGE Local 2211 when she was a federal government economist and Melanie Vant, a 13-year veteran of a now decimated USAID. Vant has been a political campaign organizer in the U.S. and supporter of embattled movements for democracy abroad.
“One of the FUN’s earliest and most powerful principles is voice,” Tafti explained. “For decades, federal workers have been expected to remain invisible—diligent but silent. But we took an oath to serve and protect the Constitution and that means protecting and serving our communities. When institutions are gutted, programs shuttered, and colleagues fired en masse, silence is no longer an option.”
Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon are Bay Area journalists and activists who are longtime contributors to Social Policy. This article is excerpted from their new book from PM Press called Courage or Complicity? How Veterans Are Responding to the Attack on Democracy, which can be ordered HERE
