“How many here are paid protesters?”
“Someone tell Marjorie Taylor Greens she’s a government worker,” one of our “Hands Off!” speakers quipped on Saturday. There were a lot of retirees among the 8,000 or so at the rally in Asheville, N.C. But a lot of current and former government workers too, including veterans. It is well known that the postal service is the largest employer of American veterans. The V.A. hospital here is (or was until recently) one of the best regarded in the system and a draw or veterans needing care now threatened by Elon Musk’s and Donald Trump’ vandals. No one took a poll, but it is likely this was the first time in the streets for many.
What binds them together is a desire to serve their country. Aside from many elected officials at the national level, perhaps, people don’t go into government work to get rich. Their motivation is intrinsic, not extrinsic. They are there for the mission not for the money.
A postdoctoral research fellow from the National Institutes of Health tells the New York Times that after ten years of study in neuroscience, he draws less than $70,000 per year.
People among the 2.4 million civilian federal workers who keep the lights on in America, writes Micah Sifry, are “by their nature, generally patriotic and politically moderate. Nearly 30 percent of them are veterans. They all take an oath to defend the Constitution.” They are, like the Americans they serve, working and middle class. And not happy to be demonized and discarded:
Human beings also don’t like being told that their life’s work is being fed “into the wood chipper,” as Mr. Musk gleefully described DOGE’s destruction of agencies like the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
It’s still early days. Many government workers are keeping their heads down, hoping to avoid attention and keep their jobs. Some are doing what they can to throw sand in the gears, by leaking damning news to reporters. Many of their unions — who just had their longstanding contracts canceled by Mr. Trump — are fighting back in the courts. And every week, more of the rank and file are speaking out, sharing their stories and organizing.
They take oaths to serve the Constitution as well, and they don’t recite those oaths like lines read from a TV script as Donald Trump did and quickly dismissed.
As the blast radius of Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk’s cuts and chaos spreads, federal workers and their message will only resonate further. It’s like the Joni Mitchell lyric: “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” The health workers, scientists, park rangers, veterans care providers, letter carriers, air traffic controllers and many others who are speaking out aren’t just trying to save their jobs — they’re trying to save programs and investments that were providing irreplaceable services to regular Americans. By going after the federal work force, Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk are radicalizing the very people who can best explain how the government does so much good for so many.
Those of us who lived through Helene’s wrath in rural Western North Carolina have recent experience with what it’s like when the lights go out and the taps run dry … and the mail doesn’t arrive and the roads and bridges have collapsed into rivers … and we spend weeks fetching creek water to flush toilets. That was a deadly natural disaster from which we are still recovering. A major road in Asheville reopened on Friday after six months of cleanup and rebuilding by the very sort of people Musk wants fed into a wood chipper. I-40 west of here is still being rebuilt. We learned what we had when it was gone overnight.
Musk and Trump have never faced that. They’re now cutting recovery funds and threatening to dismantle FEMA as well as other chunks of U.S. infrastructure that make this the world’s richest country.
Trump 2.0 is a manmade disaster with effects much more immediate than the climate change that spawned Helene and killed my neighbors. Musk-Trump’s vandalism, especially of federally funded health programs and medical research will kill more out of malice that Helene lacked. People across the country know it. on Saturday, a half million showed it.
“How many here are paid protesters?” asked one of our speakers. Thousands howled with laughter.
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