Democrats Are Looking for the Resistance in All the Wrong Places

New York Times

05-04-2025

Ever since Donald Trump returned to the White House and turned Elon Musk's chain saw on longstanding federal programs and agencies, Democratic voters have been asking: Where is the opposition?
Democrats are still furious at Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, for helping Mr. Trump keep the government open; many find the public style of Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader in the House, too buttoned-up to meet the moment. And while more Democratic politicians are jetting to town hall meetings and rallies, list-building and maneuvering to run for president in 2028 aren't the same thing as organizing. Even Senator Cory Booker, who took to the Senate floor this week with a 25-hour speech, capped his heroic effort with a volley of texts and emails asking for money. That's not how you build a movement.
Democrats have been looking for the next resistance in all the wrong places. Instead of waiting for some politician to say the right words and catch fire, they should look to the people who are already on fire: federal workers.
America's 2.4 million civilian federal workers are, by their nature, generally patriotic and politically moderate. Nearly 30 percent of them are veterans. They all take an oath to defend the Constitution. Also, unlike many politicians from both parties who went to elite schools, are worth millions and have to talk about their parents' or grandparents' humble beginnings to claim a connection to their constituents, most federal workers are just like the people they serve: working and middle class.
All this makes them uniquely well positioned to lead a new kind of resistance — more mainstream and grounded than the last one, and powerful enough to mobilize millions of Americans under its banner.
It's a truism that Americans do not realize how much good the federal government does in their lives. But now there's an army spreading out to remind them. In March, off-duty park rangers led demonstrations in more than 100 locations, from Abraham Lincoln's home to Zion National Park. Postal employees, who work for an independent federal agency and number about 635,000 nationwide, held similar rallies in more than 200 places.
Federal workers are also protesting inside the U.S. Capitol, testifying at community impact hearings and speaking up at town halls. On Saturday, groups such as Indivisible and MoveOn, which helped lead the resistance to Mr. Trump during his first term, are staging their first big national demonstration in Washington, and federal workers and their unions have a significant role. Satellite rallies are happening in more than 1,000 locations around the country.
Why is this new defiance emerging from this corner of the political landscape? Many Democrats accepted Mr. Trump's re-election with a kind of stunned resignation — it's hard to argue with a popular and electoral vote victory. But hardly anyone expected Mr. Musk's rampage through the heart of the federal government with his so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
The authors of Project 2025, a blueprint prepared for Mr. Trump's new term, called for tightening government hiring and retention standards, and for making it easier to fire low-performing civil servants. They did not recommend giving an unelected mega-billionaire super-bureaucrat the power to demolish whole government agencies and programs overnight by deleting their budgets, firing many of their employees without cause or due process and badgering the rest with mass emails demanding they prove their value on a weekly basis.
Human beings also don't like being told that their life's work is being fed 'into the wood chipper,' as Mr. Musk gleefully described DOGE's destruction of agencies like the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
It's still early days. Many government workers are keeping their heads down, hoping to avoid attention and keep their jobs. Some are doing what they can to throw sand in the gears, by leaking damning news to reporters. Many of their unions — who just had their longstanding contracts canceled by Mr. Trump — are fighting back in the courts. And every week, more of the rank and file are speaking out, sharing their stories and organizing.
Rosa Lafer-Sousa and Matt Brown are postdoctoral research fellows at the National Institutes of Health, doing cutting-edge work in neuroscience. They're both officers in the fledgling union of N.I.H. fellows. Despite their prestigious jobs, most of the fellows live paycheck to paycheck, Dr. Brown said. After 10 years of academic study, he makes less than $70,000 a year.
DOGE's firing spree is breeding a heightened political awareness in them. 'I spend a lot of time on TikTok,' Dr. Lafer-Sousa said. 'Very early on, seeing videos in my feed of veterans who had just been illegally terminated, seeing scientists who had just been illegally terminated, seeing park rangers,' she said, she realized that 'this is our coalition. We are now all experiencing the same cruel treatment, and we can work together to fight back against this.'
'What unites us is we all took an oath,' she added. 'We all chose, at least within the federal sector, to serve our country.'
An Army Corps of Engineers worker said something similar when we met in March at a weekly picket outside the office of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in Lower Manhattan. He described how the day he was hired, he stood by a flag, put his hand on a Bible and took an oath to defend the Constitution. He had come out on his lunch break to support fired bureau workers. 'They keep Wall Street in line,' he explained. 'This is all crucial to the way we live our lives, the way we protect our homes and the way the American system has worked.'
As we talked, protesters of all races and ages marched in circles, waving American flags and chanting things like '2-4-6-8, Dodd-Frank is pretty great!' One woman held a sign that read, 'Credit card late fees? Hidden charges on auto loans? Mortgage lender 'loses' your payment? THE C.F.P.B. HELPS YOU.'
Since Mr. Trump returned to office, dozens of clinical drug trials have been halted, cancer research programs have been shut down, commercial fishers in the midst of updating their boats have lost thousands of dollars, food banks have gone into panic mode, veterans have lost mental health counselors, parents of kids with special needs have been told to expect fewer school aides, and the Social Security website crashed four times in 10 days.
As the blast radius of Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk's cuts and chaos spreads, federal workers and their message will only resonate further. It's like the Joni Mitchell lyric: 'You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone.' The health workers, scientists, park rangers, veterans care providers, letter carriers, air traffic controllers and many others who are speaking out aren't just trying to save their jobs — they're trying to save programs and investments that were providing irreplaceable services to regular Americans. By going after the federal work force, Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk are radicalizing the very people who can best explain how the government does so much good for so many.