- Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is working to remake the federal government.
- Musk wants to reduce spending, which includes reducing the number of federal workers.
- A group of unions is pushing back.
Some of the world’s largest unions are organizing to counter Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
In an opposition campaign called the “Department of People Who Work for a Living,” the AFL-CIO said it sought to hold DOGE accountable.
“We will hold DOGE and Elon Musk accountable because we are certain that the people who keep our food and medicine safe know more about how to make government efficient than an outsider whose companies benefit from the very agencies he is infiltrating,” Liz Shuler, the president of the AFL-CIO, a federation that represents nearly 15 million people in over 60 national and international unions, said in a press release on Wednesday.
Tensions over Musk’s effort to cut federal spending, which includes reducing the federal workforce, are on the rise. Protesters, including Democratic leaders, rallied outside the Treasury Department on Tuesday. They accused the department of giving DOGE unlawful access to sensitive information. On Monday, three federal employee unions sued the Treasury Department.
For its part, DOGE sees the reductions as necessary to reign in government spending and lower the deficit.
“DOGE is saving the Federal Government approx. $1 billion/day, mostly from stopping the hiring of people into unnecessary positions, deletion of DEI, and stopping improper payments to foreign organizations,” DOGE said in a post on X in January.
Musk is no stranger to union ire. The billionaire has said that he disagrees “with the idea of unions” and as Tesla’s CEO, Musk has resisted unionization efforts.
Trump and Musk are also working to overhaul the US Agency for International Development, which is set to put nearly all of its staff on administrative leave beginning on Friday.
“Working people have seen this movie before: so-called efficiency experts who come into the workplace without background knowledge and cut the workforce to make more profit,” AFL-CIO said in its press release. “That model might work in the private sector, but government services aren’t lines on a spreadsheet — they have real-world impacts on actual people in communities across the country.”
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