Before Elon Musk can exercise authoritarian power, he must purge the federal bureaucracy. But federal workers aren’t playing ball.
As many as 200,000 federal employees with weaker civil service protections could be let go. But they are supposed to only be fired for poor performance. FAA director Mike Whitaker resigned, effective January 20.
Will limitless power meet unlimited resistance?
Even as Donald Trump seeks to disavow Project 2025, he and the rightwing effort’s authors have voiced similarly hostile plans for the US’s 2 million-plus federal employees – to replace many of them with political appointees.
A sickout by unpaid federal employees could bring the impasse—and their status as hostages to the president’s whim—to an end. Federal workers might learn from the successful example set by teachers from West Virginia to Arizona in 2018.
Anti-government hysteria has fueled everything from congressional kamikaze attacks on Obamacare to actual kamikaze attacks on federal buildings, and those who get hurt are inevitably people doing their jobs.
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