Federal workers and Maryland leaders continue to combat President Donald Trump’s efforts targeting government employees as courts examine the legality of his orders — and as he reportedly plans to issue more.
“Federal workers, do not surrender,” Everett Kelley, the head of the largest union of federal employees, said Friday in a live Instagram conversation with U.S. Rep. Sarah Elfreth of Anne Arundel County. “We’re in this fight, and we need to fight. We need to fight like we’ve never fought before.”
Trump and the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency are entering their fourth week of directives that have sought to significantly downsize the 2.3 million federal civilian workforce.
A nearly government-wide hiring freeze, the firing of longtime workers and an offer to pay others to resign are among the moves that have already decimated agencies like the United States Agency for International Development, disrupted work at the Maryland-based National Institutes for Health, and ended all diversity, equity and inclusion offices.
“CLOSE IT DOWN!” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social on Friday, celebrating the dismantling of USAID, for what he claimed was “totally unexplainable” and “fraudulently” spent money by the agency that delivered aid to countries around the world.
Thousands of workers at the Department of Health and Human Services were potentially the subject of new termination orders as soon as this week, the Wall Street Journal reported. The department oversees several agencies in Maryland — from the NIH in Bethesda to the Food and Drug Administration in Silver Spring.
Kelley’s union — the American Federation of Government Employees — has sued Trump’s administration on multiple fronts and planned to hold a rally with workers and prominent politicians Tuesday on Capitol Hill. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, U.S. Sen. Angela Alsobrooks and U.S. Rep. Steny Hoyer were among the list of expected attendees.
“Hundreds of AFGE workers and members of Congress will join us to defend the civil servants and make sure that the American people continue to receive services that they depend on — and not just depend on, but that that they deserve,” said Kelley, whose union represents 800,000 workers across the country and many of the nearly 160,000 federal employees based in Maryland.
The rally will follow a Monday afternoon hearing in an AFGE-backed federal lawsuit challenging the buyout program that asked employees to resign with seven months of paid leave or otherwise face layoffs.
The White House said 40,000 employees had applied for that “very generous” offer by Thursday’s deadline, though a federal judge in Boston extended it until the hearing.
Elfreth, a freshman Democrat who hosted the conversation with Kelley, has warned about the impacts on 44,000 workers in her district who work at the Chesapeake Bay Program Office, the U.S. Naval Academy, the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and more. Like other representatives from Maryland, she has launched a form on her website to collect stories from federal workers while also acknowledging the most effective fights, for those who oppose Trump’s efforts, will likely come in the courts rather than the halls of Congress where Republicans are in the majority.
“This is an issue that [is] going to be fought out in the courts, but every single one of your members should know that you have their back,” she told Kelley. “We have their back in Congress. You have their back in the court system.”
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