On February 14, more than 360 government employees and their supporters joined an on-line meeting organized by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Council 238, which represents workers in the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Labor Network for Sustainability. The purpose was to bring together environmental and climate advocates with the workers whose job is to protect the environment and the climate – and who are currently threatened with mass firing by the Trump administration. LNS Director of Strategic Campaigns Sydney Ghazarian explained:
We face an existential risk from the climate crisis. But the Trump administration’s priority is clear: helping corporations do whatever they want no matter the cost. It’s the Environmental Protection Agency that protects us from corporations poisoning our air, our water, and our environment. Every day thousands of dedicated EPA workers are standing up to big business and cleaning up toxic waste, enforcing the Clean Air Act, and facilitating the transition to clean energy.
Joyce Howell, executive vice president of AFGE Council 238, who was an attorney enforcing hazardous waste law, explained that the purpose of mass firings is largely to get money to extend the tax cut for the rich that is about to sunset:
The target that’s been set by DOGE is one-third to one-half reduction in the number of EPA employees. They are looking for a way to pay for a billionaire tax cut. And to do that, they have to offset it with trillions of dollars of cuts in other parts of the budget.
Justin Chen, president of a AFGE Local 1003 representing EPA workers in Texas, is an EPA inspector and enforcement officer working to enforce the Clean Air Act. He portrayed the attack on government workers as an attack on American democracy and the American people:
The EPA, indeed the entirety of the federal Civil Service, basically are public servants, and as servants, basically we serve you. We serve the citizens of this country and it’s under attack by billionaires. It’s very obvious what is going on over here. They basically want to treat the rest of us just as their own playthings, as their servants, returning us back to a way worse time where you had no voice in your democracy.
These attacks on public service mean they just want to privatize everything. They want to make it so that every flow of any amount of money or resources has to go through them, instead of being democratically accountable through your government.
We have a tyrant who is stating, hey, I can do whatever I want to whomever I choose, and I can also refuse service to the citizens of this country. And that’s not the democracy that we built. This is not the democracy that thousands of people have given up their lives for so that we can have the freedoms that we enjoy and the lives that we enjoy and expect for our children.
Ultimately the people that are going to save us are ourselves. We have to rely upon each other, we have to get the word out, and we have to plan and take action. It’s going to be a tough road, but something stronger and more beautiful may come out of this at the end as long as we hold together.