Defying the ‘Wrecking Ball’: Federal Workers in NYC Protest Trump-Musk Purge
On Feb. 11, federal workers hired within the last two years received a mass email telling them they were “not fit for continued employment.” Photos/Steve Wishnia
By Steve Wishnia
“How do you spell corruption? E-L-O-N!” about 250 picketers chanted in front of 26 Federal Plaza Feb. 19, in the first of two lower Manhattan protests to defend federal workers from the personnel purge by Donald Trump and his hectobillionaire hatchet man, Elon Musk. Five hours later, a crowd of about 750 filled the concrete island in Foley Square for an after-work rally.
Many were federal workers hired within the last two years who on the night of Feb. 11 received a mass email telling them they were “not fit for continued employment.”
“I was illegally fired,” says Jasmine McAllister, who was a data scientist at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “They didn’t even tell my supervisor.” The CFPB, which goes after fraud in consumer finance, was one of the first government agencies marked for extermination by Trump, Musk, and Project 2025. About 150 bureau workers nationally were axed.
Musk “came in like a wrecking ball to knock it all down,” McAllister, a member of National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) Chapter 335, told Work-Bites. She described her former job as working with lawyers to ascertain, for example, whether fees charged on a loan were illegal because they hadn’t been disclosed to the borrower, and then going through the data to find out how much money had been stolen.
The email said she’d been fired for “performance,” McAllister says, but that was “obviously not” true: Both her supervisor and their supervisor had rated her work satisfactory. But with only seven months on the job, she was an easy target, a probationary employee without full civil-service protections.
“They sent us a letter saying we weren’t fit for the job, and they didn’t bother to fill in our names. All of us got fantastic reviews,” Mark Ledov, a former CFPB enforcement attorney, told Work-Bites before the second rally. He came to the bureau last March, “suing predatory lenders and trying to get money back for consumers,” after eight years with the New York State Attorney General’s office.
“People doing important work are being let go haphazardly and randomly, fired illegally.” — Will Kay, American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 1923.
“We were doing a lot of good work,” Ledov says, and he and his coworkers had expected to continue doing it.
An Environmental Protection Agency worker who asked for anonymity because he’s trying to get his job back said he’d been put on administrative leave—“because I worked on environmental justice, it’s considered DEI.”
“We are not just defending our jobs here,” he says. “We are protecting the public from corruption and disaster.”
“People doing important work are being let go haphazardly and randomly, fired illegally,” says Will Kay, an American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 1923 member who works at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “They’re not even talking to managers or trying to gauge performance.”
The NTEU and four other unions representing federal workers filed a lawsuit in federal court Feb. 12, arguing that the Executive Branch’s attempts to “decimate” the federal workforce “conflict with Congress’s role in establishing that workforce and its respective portfolio of work and thus violate separation of powers principles.”
On Feb. 14, a federal judge in Washington ordered acting CFPB director Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025, to not terminate any CFPB employee, “except for cause related to the specific employee’s performance or conduct,” pending a hearing on March 3.
The Federal Plaza rally drew significant contingents from other unions, including 32BJ SEIU, the New York State Nurses Association, and the Organization of Staff Analysts.
‘Obligation to resist’
The two protests were among several “Save Our Services” demonstrations around the nation, in places like Washington, Seattle, Albuquerque, Albany, and Boise, Idaho. They were organized by the Federal Unionists Network, a coalition of members of unions representing federal workers, including AFGE, the NTEU, and the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers.
The two New York City protests on Feb. 19 were among several “Save Our Services” demonstrations around the nation, in places like Washington, Seattle, Albuquerque, Albany, and Boise, Idaho.
EPA worker Suzanne Englot warned the Foley Square crowd that every terminated worker at the agency is “one less person testing your local drinking-water quality.” Trump and Musk, she added, “don’t believe in protecting the environment, and they don’t believe in workers’ rights.”
“This is about eviscerating government to the point of no return,” said City Councilmember Tiffany Cabán (D-Queens).
“We are not going down without the biggest fight you have ever seen,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) exhorted. “Elon Musk is not going after efficiency. He’s not going after making these things better for people. He’s trying to steal Medicaid so that he can enrich himself. He is trying to steal and gut NASA to line his pockets with SpaceX. He is trying to gut everything that is good in America for his own private profit. This is the culmination of what oligarchy is all about and what oligarchy seeks to do.
“We have an obligation to resist oligarchs,” she continued. “Don’t agree in advance. We can overwhelm them. They’ve got money, but we’ve got people.
“There is no act too small,” she concluded.
“They’re after nothing more than the entire public sphere,” Chris Dols of the Federal Unionists Network told the Foley Square crowd. He urged other public-sector unions to join the fight and “make it unmanageable.”
“It’s our country—and we will do something about it,” he said.