Joseph A. McCartin, Dissent Magazine - The new regime’s brazen aggression and extreme goals are most visible in the frontal attack on the U.S. federal workforce, which has witnessed the gutting or disabling of several agencies, layoffs at virtually all others, the shredding of collective bargaining contracts with federal unions, and an attempt to effectively break the civil service.
The leaders of this effort told us long ago that this is what they had in mind. In September 2021, J.D. Vance laid out this vision with shameless candor to a conservative podcaster. What Donald Trump should do if he regained office, Vance said, is “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state” and “replace them with our people.” And “when the courts stop [him],” he said, “because [he] will get taken to court,” Trump should “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say the Chief Justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.”
The arrival of this moment has brought the American labor movement to a crossroads. Not since President Ronald Reagan broke the illegal air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981 by firing and permanently replacing the strikers has an administration’s treatment of federal workers threatened to impact U.S. labor relations as broadly and profoundly as the recent actions of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Reagan’s breaking of the walkout by the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) inspired a torrent of private sector anti-unionism that saw employers break a host of prominent strikes in the 1980s, dealing a devastating blow to the union movement and hurting workers more broadly. Yet compared to the current administration, Reagan’s approach to the PATCO strike was mild.
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