Federal workers are pushing back on President Donald Trump’s claims about the state of the country and the mass firing spree under his watch, warning it will undermine communities and leave people across the country with diminished access to the services that they rely on.
At the news conference Wednesday, Paul Osadebe, a union steward with the American Federation of Government Employees Local 476, said that Trump’s lengthy State of the Union speech this week was but his latest attempt to “distract and to pit Americans against each other.”
In his own remarks, he highlighted how Trump scapegoated transgender Americans and immigrants while neglecting to discuss topics like affordable housing. He said that Americans will have a harder time interacting with the federal government’s programs because of Trump.
“One thing I want to focus on is that the federal government has offices all across the country. These are offices that are created so that people in local areas can get help directly from someone from their community. In their community. They don't have to talk to someone from DC,” Osadebe said. “They can talk to someone in rural Idaho who's there to help them, and those are the exact people [whose] offices are being closed. You will not be able to get local help.”
Chris Wicker, former deputy director of Minnesota’s small business administration office, who attended Tuesday night’s address as a guest of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., noted that Trump didn’t do anything to comfort veterans across the country, who are watching the administration make drastic cuts to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
“I didn't hear anything about how I, as a veteran, I'm going to expect continuation of benefits at my local VA,” Wickler said. "I didn't hear anything about how this business plan of gutting the Federal workforce is still going to be able to sustain important services in my community of Minneapolis, Minnesota. And so I had the unique opportunity to sit in front of what was basically a campaign rally and hear the same policy repetitions that we've been listening to this entire time.”
Wickler later added that some 30% of federal workers are veterans and that most of the federal employees working in rural areas work for either the VA or the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“This means these job cuts will hit rural Americans the hardest — people who already have limited access to resources. It also means veterans who depend on federal services will be some of the most severely affected. If you want to know who will bear the long-term effects of these layoffs, look at the most vulnerable people in your community — the ones who need the most support from a government that’s supposed to safeguard the well-being of its people,” Wickler said.
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Tiffany Montes, a recently fired National Parks Service worker, noted how Trump made no acknowledgement that his mass firing spree has thrown droves of former federal workers' lives into uncertainty.
“I just wanted to hear him say, "Hey, we'll do something for you guys," or just anything. But the whole time, all I did — all I saw — was him speaking to one side of the room, barely acknowledging the other side,” Montes said.
Montes went on to say that other Americans would feel Trump’s cuts when they go to visit national parks this summer and services are cut, or when they are unable to because of staffing shortfalls. She said many of her former coworkers are now looking at opportunities outside the federal government.
“Right now, people are terrified. Talking to my old coworkers, they’re just waiting—waiting for the next mass layoff to hit. They have no idea if they’re next because there’s no real logic behind who is being fired. A lot of them are already looking for other jobs, but there aren't always many options,” Montes said.
Allusion Lacko, a former child nutrition researcher at the USDA Food and Nutrition Service, said in response to Trump’s speech that "he perpetuated the myth that we are some kind of unaccountable bureaucracy. But I worked with some of the most talented and dedicated professionals, people who showed up to work every day because ... this isn’t just a job to us. We’re dedicated to this work.”
Lacko went on to say that Trump’s mass firings at the USDA go against his stated goal of keeping “our children healthy and strong.” She described how the severe cuts happening under the Trump administration would ripple through the American economy.
“The mass layoffs of federal workers aren’t happening in isolation. The federal government provides a huge number of contracts and grants to other organizations, which also support jobs,” Lacko said. "For example, USAID wasn’t just shuttered — every organization that received grants from USAID lost funding, too. I know people who worked at NGOs that had to lay off 80% of their employees overnight because their federal contracts were cut."
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