The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) calls on the working class in the United States to prepare mass action to stop the Trump administration’s rampage against federal jobs.
Rank-and-file committees—excluding union officials and representatives of either corporate party—should be built to unite federal workers, postal workers and private-sector workers, to organize mass demonstrations and other forms of collective action to defend jobs and social programs.
Less than a month into the new administration, tens of thousands of federal workers have already been forced out of their jobs. On Friday, the Department of Health and Human Services announced it would fire over 5,000 employees. Over the weekend, reports emerged that nearly 1,300 jobs will be cut at the Food and Drug Administration.
This is only the beginning. Hundreds of thousands of jobs out of a federal workforce of over two million are under threat. While around 30 percent of these workers live and work in the Washington, D.C. area, the vast majority are spread across every part of the United States.
These cuts are flagrantly illegal, violating protections against politically motivated layoffs in the civil service. Trump has also given billionaire and fellow fascist Elon Musk the power of the purse through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), allowing him to dismantle entire agencies at the press of a key.
The attack on federal workers is only the spearhead of a broader assault on the working class. The social programs in danger of being slashed—including Medicaid, food stamps and public education—are lifelines for millions. Trump has placed figures in charge of federal agencies whose explicit mission is to destroy the departments they nominally lead, including anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at Health and Human Services and billionaire wrestling magnate Linda McMahon at the Department of Education.
A parallel attack is underway against the US Postal Service, which Trump has indicated his intent to privatize. Whatever remains of the post office—whose existence is enshrined in the Constitution—will be sold off to oligarchs like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, turning it into a for-profit enterprise.
The claim that these cuts are about “efficiency” is absurd coming from Musk, whose nearly $500 billion fortune, amassed from US military contracts and Wall Street speculation, is the very definition of waste and parasitism. The real aim is to dismantle environmental protections, workplace safety regulations, public health initiatives and consumer safeguards—removing any restrictions on the complete and unrestricted exploitation of the working class. Musk and the oligarchy’s looting of public resources amounts to the biggest heist in human history.
Trump himself made clear the dictatorial character of his administration in an X/Twitter post over the weekend: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” In other words, Trump is declaring himself above the law, modeling his rule on the Führer principle.
Under the new regime Trump is trying to establish, workers will have no rights. His attacks on immigrants serve not only to scapegoat “foreign” workers for the poverty created by US corporations, but also to redefine citizenship as contingent on personal loyalty to the leader, ripping up fundamental constitutional protections for the entire working class.
The presence of Musk proves that the administration is the most naked and open form of government of, by and for the oligarchy.
The only areas where Trump is pouring in money are the military and police, reducing the government to what Friedrich Engels defined as “bodies of armed men” and “prisons of all kinds.” The cuts to social programs serve only to free up resources for massive new wars—not only against official enemies like China but even against countries that were labeled “allies” yesterday, such as Canada and the European powers.
Trump’s threats to annex Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal, along with his “America First” militarization, aim to convert North America into an armed fortress in preparation for global war.
In the face of what is acknowledged in the press to be the most serious Constitutional crisis in US history, the Democratic Party is completely feckless. It refuses to even clearly state what is happening to the public. This is because the Democrats are also a party of corporate America and are terrified of opposition from below.
The trade union apparatus, for its part, varies between cowardice and outright collaboration. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and other government unions tell workers to rely on the courts, even as Trump’s co-conspirators run the Supreme Court and the National Labor Relations Board, which has been rendered inoperative by Trump’s mass firings. They insist on cringing obedience to anti-strike labor laws, while Trump blatantly violates every law that he can to carry out mass firings.
Other unions, including the Teamsters, the International Longshoremen’s Association, and the United Auto Workers, openly support Trump’s racist nationalism, lying to workers that his economic policies will somehow save their jobs.
Forty-four years ago, President Ronald Reagan fired and blacklisted 11,000 striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), marking a turning point towards all-out class war by the American ruling class. What followed were decades of job cuts and factory closures that continue to this day.
At the time, there was mass support in the working class for a general strike to defend PATCO—evidenced by the September 19, 1981 Solidarity Day demonstration, where half a million workers marched in Washington, D.C., one of the largest protests in American history.
This potential was betrayed by the AFL-CIO bureaucracy, which abandoned PATCO to its fate even before the strike began. The AFL-CIO’s response marked a shift of the union bureaucrats into open agents of management, colluding in the government campaign to break the militant resistance of workers and carry out a historic reduction in living standards.
Trump’s attacks dwarf the scale of PATCO, and mass opposition will inevitably emerge. The tariff war policies being pursued by Trump will wreak havoc on the economy, leading to mass layoffs and unemployment, while his attacks on immigrants and democratic rights will provoke a social explosion.
In the scale of history, Trump and his relative handful of oligarchs and fascist conspirators amount to nothing next to 200 million workers in the US and billions more worldwide. But the critical issue is that the working class be mobilized as an independent force and as the social basis for the fight against the Trump administration.
Above all, workers in the US must appeal for international support, rejecting Trump’s “America First” lies. Workers around the world must oppose what is happening in America in order to fight similar far-right conspiracies in their own countries, which are also being openly promoted by the White House. At the same time, global unity is necessary because a fascist dictatorship in America threatens every person on the planet.
The development of committees to oppose the assault on federal workers must be connected to the defense of democratic rights against dictatorship, including through neighborhood and workplace committees to defend immigrants. The wealth of the oligarchy, which stands behind Trump’s threats to democratic rights, must be expropriated and America’s war machine dismantled to vastly improve public health, education, infrastructure and key social programs on which tens of millions rely.
The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, which includes committees around the world fighting for the independence of the working class in the face of corporate attacks, can serve as a global nerve center for a broad counter-offensive to force an end to the threat of dictatorship in the United States.