WASHINGTON – Workers, unionized with AFGE and the Treasurers’ union, joined by their non-union colleagues, literally put their bodies on the line yesterday to block entrances into government buildings by operatives of Elon Musk who moved quickly to take over government servers in those buildings and seize control of major government agencies.
The Musk invaders did not even have keys or codes to gain entrance in most cases and coerced some workers to give up their keys so they could get in. Uniformed men who may have been from the Department of Homeland Security eventually pushed evicted workers out of the way and the unidentified uniformed men guarded the doors of the agencies so no one, neither the workers or even elected lawmakers could gain entrance.
Shut out and locked out workers massed outside buildings, especially the offices of USAID to protest the Musk steamroller aptly called a coup by top U.S. senators including Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and top congressional representatives including Maryland’s Jamie Raskin and Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar. The lawmakers rushed to the area outside the offices of USAID, which had been seized by Musk. There they lent their support to shut out workers who were protesting the takeover and the lockout.
“We are not going to sit back,” the workers shouted as they protested the coup that had unfolded right before their eyes.
Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut also called the takeover of government agencies by Musk a “coup” whose purpose, he said, “Is to take away the pay of the workers at congressionally approved agencies and hand it over to his rich billionaire friends in the form of additional tax breaks on top of what Trump gave them the first time around.”
Ilhan Omar declared: “This is a coup, the first step of which is to create a dictatorship. This is how dictatorships start. This is how they begin – by trashing the Constitution.”
Protests by workers are scheduled for today again including one at 5 p.m. at the Office of Personnel Management. Perhaps the most dangerous takeover thus far has been at the Treasury Department where Musk and his minions now have direct control of the private personal data of millions of Americans.
“I see a coup here, a seizure of power, by unelected actors aiming to control not just data but the finances and the military of this country, institutions that should be under democratic control by elected lawmakers,” said Rep. Raskin who was a respected constitutional lawyer for years before he went to Congress.
In the minds of many now there’s a question of who’s the real “dictator” in the Trump White House: Donald Trump, who promised to be “a dictator on day one” who has gone beyond that for two weeks and counting, or multibillionaire Elon Musk, who pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Trump’s campaign and who now leads the president around like a dog on a leash.
The answer, for campaigners and protesters ever since Trump took over the Oval Office and continuing this week in front of federal agencies is that Musk is now the real ruler.
But the evidence is there, right out in the open: Musk, elected to nothing, recipient of a record-breaking compensation bonus from one of his firms, EV maker Tesla, and now an unpaid federal worker, according to Trump’s spokeswoman, is running the show, via his “advisory committee” to Trump, the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE.
As a matter of history, “Doge” was the title of the autocratic rulers of Venice, Italy, at the height of its maritime power and clout more than 700 years ago. Sounds prescient.
Musk’s not stopping with the U.S., either. He’s trying to interfere in the United Kingdom’s politics and is campaigning, via video for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party—Adolf Hitler’s political descendants—in Germany. Elections there are on February 23 and AfD is gaining.
But Musk is a lot more than an unpaid advisor to Trump. Trump tried four years ago to pull off a violent coup d’etat to keep himself in the Oval Office. Musk is working now to pull off his own pulled off his own coup.
When Musk declares the nation’s foreign aid agency, USAID, should be closed, the workers are barred, law enforcement personnel in unmarked uniforms throw the USAID chief out the door physically, then slam it on everyone else, including lawmakers.
Musk called USAID, “a criminal organization.” He added:” We’re shutting it down, putting it into the woodchipper.” Only Congress can end USAID since only Congress is empowered under the Constitution to establish such agencies. Said Trump, later, after the agency’s doors were barred and workers physically ejected, AID “is run by radical lunatics.”
Start of a week of protests
That brought the start of a week of protests in front of USAID’s now-closed offices in D.C. The protests continued early Tuesday morning and were scheduled to go all week long, organizers said. MAGAites counter-protested on social media.
“Watch panicked Democrats surround the USAID headquarters in DC in a desperate attempt to stop Elon Musk’s ongoing discovery of their mass theft of public funds,” right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones mocked on Twitter/X, which Musk owns and controls.
And USAID’s Trump-named chief of staff, Matt Hopson, quit to protest handing over access to classified information to DOGE staffers who lacked security clearances.
When Musk inveighs against federal spending—a key part of DOGE’s mandate—Trump produces an executive order that freezes federal grant money, leaving thousands of workers with nothing to do and thousands of grant recipients–from a road project in Illinois to an AIDS clinic in Musk’s native Pretoria, South Africa–wondering whether and if they can keep going.
Agencies from D.C. to Seattle see their projects, including transportation projects, stopped in their tracks. Will County, Ill., just got $27 million to build a rail overpass and eliminate a dangerous grade crossing at Gougar Road just down the street from a high school in New Lenox, Ill., the Will County (Ill.) Labor Record reported. It’s now in limbo. So are 122 other rail crossing eliminations nationwide.
Some of the rank-and-file Democrats are raising hell, notably Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and others. Warren, a former pro-consumer economics professor at Harvard, talked February 3 about how Musk, thanks to access he gained through Trump, can now decide whether you get your Social Security check or not. He’s got your personal records, too.
“Donald Trump and his billionaire buddies are determined to take over this government to make it work better for themselves and worse for everyone else,” says Warren.
“When unelected billionaires start ransacking our government offices, this is not business as usual. Nope. Nothing is normal. We are living a nightmare created by Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and we need to wake up. We need to use every tool we have to fight back, and in the Senate, we can start by saying NO to dangerous Trump nominees.”
Raskin says Musk’s spending freeze breaks violates several provisions of the U.S. Constitution. One is that Congress—not the president and not an unelected multibillionaire—has the power of the purse. It decides what and how much gets spent and where.
Second is that the same Constitution states the president’s duty is “to take care the laws be faithfully executed.” Trump started violating that, but now Musk has taken it out of his hands.
No fourth branch of government
“We don’t have a fourth branch of government called Elon Musk,” said Rep. Raskin, a constitutional law professor on leave while he serves in Congress. To Musk, he cited the nation’s basic document: “You don’t control the money of the American people. The United States Congress does.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a former Florida senator and current Trump toady, agrees with Trump and Musk. He arbitrarily took over USAID. His former Democratic colleagues on the Foreign Relations Committee reminded Rubio: “Any effort to merge or fold USAID into the Department of State should be, and by law must be, previewed, discussed and approved by Congress.”
Warren says the situation’s even worse than one agency or one takeover. She warns everything’s at risk of being grabbed by Musk. Not just your Social Security check, but Social Security’s records about you—who you worked for, how much you got paid, and other personal data.
“Maybe you get paid, or maybe you don’t—because now it appears that all of us work for Elon Musk,” Warren told a February 3 press conference.
“Elon just grabbed the controls of that whole” $6 trillion “payment system, demanding the power to turn it on for his friends or turn it off for anyone he doesn’t like. One guy deciding who gets paid and who doesn’t. It is not the law, but it is the reality.
“Elon and friends now have full access to your personal and financial information that’s in the system. Your payment history. Your Social Security number. Your bank account numbers. Elon now has the power to suck out all that information for his own use. Now, whether it’s to boost his finances or expand his political power, it is all up to Elon.” And safeguards, including against hackers, are gone.
Trump, prompted by Musk, arbitrarily fired leaders of independent agencies long before their terms legally expired: Deepak Chopra, director of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, whose term expires in 2026, National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox, a former Service Employees counsel, whose term expires in August and NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo. Top staffers at the board, including Communications Director Kayla Blado, left, too.
On February 1, Musk and Trump trashed Chopra, a noted consumer advocate who went after the big banks, traders, financiers and brokers—among others—who ripped off consumers.
Chopra’s replacement is Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, a hedge fund manager. Hedge funds are notorious for their secretiveness, swooping into companies, buying them up, bleeding them dry, selling their real estate, firing staffers and closing them down, walking away with the profits, leaving jobless people and broken lives. Bessent promptly froze CFPB’s accounts.
Musk’s takeover, via Bessent, is just the tip of the iceberg, said Warren, who taught consumer finance and economics—and was a sharp critic of unbridled capitalism—at Harvard. She also crafted the CFPB.
Determined to take over
“Donald Trump and his billionaire buddies are determined to take over this government to make it work better for themselves and worse for everyone else. And this is just the start. As we gear up for the tax fight, it will become even clearer that Trump will open the doors for billionaires and giant corporations to find more ways to loot the government at your expense. Meanwhile, everyone else pays more for groceries, more for housing, more for prescription drugs, and more for healthcare.”
Over at the NLRB, the firings of Wilcox and Abruzzo left the board with no enforcement power. It needs three members, out of five seats, for a quorum to do business, including decisions on worker-boss cases. Take away Wilcox, and it has only two. Take away Abruzzo, and who brings the cases?
That, of course, delights Musk. He, Amazon founder/chief stockholder Jeff Bezos, and Starbucks founder Howard Schultz, among others, are challenging the very constitutionality of the NLRB in federal court, before Trump-named judges, in deep-red Texas and Louisiana.
Musk didn’t stop with ordering Trump to freeze spending. Trump also froze hiring, imposed political qualifications on top formerly non-partisan positions, proposed firing all two million federal workers, starting now, by giving them eight months’ severance pay and then launched an executive order designed to dismantle their unions and worker protections.
Unions, Democratic state governors, non-profit organizations and Democratic—so far—state Attorneys General are challenging Musk and Trump, primarily in court. Expect lawsuits, lots of lawsuits.
“Today’s memorandum” by Musk via Trump against union collective bargaining agreements “is one more action taken by Mr. Musk and the Trump administration this week attempting to frighten and confuse career federal employees,” Government Employees (AFGE) President Clarence Kelley retorted in the first of two tweets.
“Federal employees should know that approved union contracts are enforceable by law, and the president does not have the authority to make unilateral changes to those agreements. AFGE members will not be intimidated. If our contracts are violated, we will aggressively defend them.”
While Warren and Raskin are raising hell about the Musk coup via Trump, some congressional leaders are dithering, says Guardian Washington columnist Moira Donegan. “What does the Democratic Party believe in? It’s difficult to tell,” she wrote on February 3.
“In the months since their defeat, the Democrats have been confused, conflicted and internally contentious over how to best proceed.
“The results have been contradictory and ineffectual. The Democrats have alternated between declaring Trump a fascist and a would-be dictator, and congratulating themselves on peacefully handing over the reins of power to him.
“They railed against his corruption and his subordination to the unelected South African billionaire Elon Musk, but also made themselves available to cooperate with Musk’s project to gut the federal bureaucracy and reshape it in his own interests, the initiative that has been moronically termed ‘Doge.’
“They pledge resistance to the Trumpist takeover of the state, and then pledge to work with Trump on what they insist are their shared priorities…No wonder the American public thinks of Democrats as out of touch, opportunistic, and cowardly. That is because they are.”
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