Behind Trump and DOGE’s Reckless Destruction Is a Determination to Crush Workers

Even the most alarmed predictions of left-leaning commentators failed to capture the extremity of the onslaught that flooded forth from the second Trump administration in its first few months. Only recently has the real severity of that opening assault come into better focus. That relentlessness was very much by design, a well-worn page of Steve Bannon’s playbook: To “flood the zone” is to leave your opponents reeling and unable to mount a response to any single atrocity.

But looking past the immediate fray, the routes taken by the Trump administration’s bewildering blitzkrieg do have a common logic. What unites these excesses is that they all represent new fronts in the waging of unrestricted class warfare against labor and working people, a strategy calibrated to the interests of capital. This administration has tactically dispensed with long-standing precedents, trampled guardrails against authoritarianism, thrown open the door for wanton profiteering and maneuvered to strike a severe blow to the labor movement.

If history is any indication, the capitalist class is willing to accede to dictatorship as long as it can secure the regime’s collaboration in pursuing its unattainable aim of infinite profit. The first 100 days of the second reign of Trump unambiguously set the terms: Agents of capital can be certain they can count on the administration’s help in the struggle against workers’ collective power. Trump and his collaborators have already signaled that they are willing to discard with democracy and sacrifice human life without compunction — even if the lives lost potentially number in the millions. They proceed as if they’re entering the final stretch, and before them lies the realization of the ultimate aims of the reactionary right: permanent hierarchy and corporate rule, mutually interlocking with untrammeled powers of state repression.

Heightening the Contradictions

In thinking about the second Trump administration’s abuses of power, it’s difficult to get a handle on the full implications. Are we really witnessing the unfolding of a neo-fascist regime? Even if we set aside the most ominous portents and parallels, it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that the extent of damage already impacting civil rights and U.S. institutions is staggering, thanks in no small part to Elon Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE).

Timi Iwayemi is a research director at the Revolving Door Project, a legal and media watchdog for corporate influence that has been tracking the fusillade of DOGE news. “All this is essentially what the Revolving Door Project has preached against,” Iwayemi said. “It’s the logical endpoint of governing by corporate power.”

“We know that there is a real material impact from these cuts which really affect the lives of Americans all over the country,” he said. “For people who have criticized [the notion of] the ‘revolving door’ and said it’s fine to install businesspeople in government — I think this should be a moment of reflection for them.”

Iwayemi said that programmatic class warfare lies behind the apparent reckless folly. Above all, what unites the administration’s chaotic gestures is a deep hostility to labor. We’re witnessing, he said, the expression of the ruling class’s “impulses to push back against workers and discipline workers, and to satisfy the forces behind this project.” This, Iwayemi says, “is a scheme to discipline workers — a scheme to crown the executive and the president as essentially the Supreme Leader.”

The many assaults on federal civil servants are serving as a way to undermine public-sector unions, which comprise about half of unionized workers in the U.S. and have been not quite as badly gouged by decades of anti-union attacks as the decimated private sector membership. While federal public sector workers are legally barred from striking, many other public workers are not, and the sector remains a major bastion of the labor movement, in large part by persisting as unionization rates have drastically collapsed. Capital is hoping to land a decisive blow akin to the PATCO strikebreaking, when Ronald Reagan’s infamous firing of air traffic controllers heavily curtailed public sector strikes.

Trump is pursuing an analogous plan, but his administration’s ambitions are larger by orders of magnitude. A recent advance is Trump’s new, second effort to institute a rule that would deem a large number of federal employees “at-will” and therefore fireable without reason. Trump now claims he can fire workers who “refuse to advance the policy interests of the President” — a threat he has already made good on elsewhere, perhaps nowhere as egregiously as in his dismissal of the Justice Department officials who had been tasked with criminally investigating him. In a show of unrestrained contempt, he’s already illegally canceled union contracts for tens of thousands of TSA employees and hundreds of thousands of workers elsewhere, citing “national security,” a nonsensical rationale for what amounts to an obscene abuse of power.

Even more extreme are the administration’s moves to neutralize the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The NLRB is an inevitable target, but its current position is extraordinarily precarious. Trump, in a heedless violation of the National Labor Relations Act, fired Biden-appointed board members, rendering the NLRB nonfunctional. The wholesale elimination of the NLRB is a worst-case scenario that is now on the verge of being realized, with the likely complicity of the Supreme Court.

Writing on Substack, labor journalist Hamilton Nolan warned of severe and imminent consequences: If labor regulation enforcement ceases, he argued, there will follow an implosion of labor rights, a lock-in of massive unaccountable corporate power, and finally the proliferation of deeply entrenched corruption into institutions.

As a prologue to this, it would seem, Trump is already lining his pockets with cryptocurrency by openly selling access to the White House to his top investors. Not to mention that his new regime is essentially defined by its yawning multitude of conflicts of interest. It’s clear that its strikes on labor are coming in tandem with the sort of systematic corporate-government melding (which is, incidentally, a definition of fascism, offered by someone who would know) that is intended to enrich investors at the expense of the civil service and the U.S. public. It’s often been noted that the central characteristic of the Trump administration, reflective of the man himself, is its eagerly corrupt self-dealing; this ends up pairing nicely with an extreme hostility to labor that also pleases the capitalist class, such that those two overarching ambitions go, naturally, hand in hand.

And there are other signs of sabotage and dirty tricks: A whistleblower revealed that the DOGE team has been illicitly siphoning confidential data about ongoing labor dispute cases — information that would be of obvious utility to labor’s opponents. DOGE has attempted similar data grabs at the Department of Labor and the Social Security Administration (SSA), but the exact motives remain unclear.

Though they also have a strong basis in racist ideology and are in many ways a political stunt aimed at pleasing a reactionary base, the Gestapo-like disappearances executed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have been no exception. There is clear evidence that, in addition to asylum seekers, green card and visa holders, U.S. citizens, and innocent families (which is not to say that criminals should be extrajudicially kidnapped and rendered to El Salvador either), deportations and arrests have explicitly targeted labor organizers.

In the case of the detentions in Albion, New York, as The Intercept reported, ICE agents deliberately and knowing targeted workers actively engaged in a major precedent-setting labor rights battle against agricultural industry interests. The agents showed up, according to a witness, with an actual list of names of union workers.

Another telling sign of Trump’s sanctioning of outright criminal risks and hostilities against workers was the recent literal decimation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration — the agency has been effectively eradicated as a regulatory force, losing the vast majority of its staff and halting numerous active investigations and oversight procedures. Clearly, Trump is signaling that corporations should feel free to take the gloves off in their treatment of their workers and their product and safety standards.

As the Trump administration goes out of its way to advertise that it will condone and facilitate companies’ running roughshod over labor, capital can be observed salivating at the prospects. In the same article, Nolan described how the business lobby has already sent Attorney General Pam Bondi at least one literal wish list of labor law decisions they’d like overturned. This made-to-order corruption would grant bosses sweeping new powers to propagandize workers in “captive audience” meetings and ignore obligations to recognize unions, among others. Without Trump’s utter contempt for the rule of law, achieving such gains would have been the slow procedural work of many years, if doing so was even possible.

Nolan wrote that the presumptuous wish list is “a well-thought-out attempt by an organization representing the majority of America’s business class to opportunistically use the poisonous lawlessness of the Trump administration [so] they can more easily exploit and oppress their own employees.… This is organized crime in action, except that none of it is ‘crime’ anymore, because the government charged with enforcing the law has decided that laws are not real.”

To further prepare the ground for corporate despotism, the Trump administration is plotting vast, aggressive and unprecedented deregulatory schemes. But capital also wants to expand its reach and colonize new territories for profit. This is the idea behind the eternal quest to privatize the SSA in order to open up a lucrative retirement plan market. If the ruling class gets its way, Medicare and Medicaid would share that fate: condemned to absorption into the abysmal and fatally inadequate private health care system.

But some companies, tech in particular, are working a different angle for extracting profit by slashing and selling off the last of the nation’s stalwart but ragged social programs. It’s become clear that even several of the biggest names in the industry, among them Musk’s X, still fail to make anything like a profit. Some, Tesla included, rely on absurdly large federal subsidies and overvaluations — indicative of a tech bubble. The same is true in the AI field; OpenAI operates at a staggering loss.

However, as Iwayemi shrewdly pointed out, the savvier operators may be formulating an exit plan. “Tech folks have realized that government contracts are a very smart way to secure long-term sustainability, like [startup defense contractors] Palantir and Anduril,” he said. Already there are active plans to force the adoption of AI systems into some SSA functions, and the intrusion of AI into state administration will not stop there.

If we really are witnessing the advent of the most significant existential threat to labor rights in living memory, we might ask: Where is the outcry from those targeted? Nolan argued in an article for In These Times that the U.S. labor movement evolved around a supporting legal framework for bargaining and has consequently found that its ability and willingness to strike have atrophied with disuse.

Iwayemi also described sensing an uncomfortable silence. “There’s an expectation that the unions would come together and respond to these attacks on their workers and their people,” he said. And in their defense, they are not immobilized. It’s true that court challenges have been filed, and judicial challenges are steadily mounting. But these are slow processes, and Trump is already off inflicting damage elsewhere. The administration has unambiguously ceased to play by the rules. Despite the risks, argued Nolan, even federal worker unions are left with no choice but to strike — against the law, in some cases, but also against the wishes of intractable and immobilized union leadership if necessary.

The gravity of the circumstances — and, in many cases, an intractable and sluggish, and anti-militant labor leadership — may justify a more confrontational approach. To those who comprehend the extreme and unprecedented nature of the threat to the movement, it’s hard to argue otherwise.

Joe Burns, a veteran labor lawyer, union leader, negotiator and author, has long argued in his numerous writings that modern unions are in desperate need of a militant revitalization, a recognition of their true power — otherwise, they’re at risk of being dismantled and neutralized entirely in capital’s unrestricted class war. This has never been more true than in this moment. After decades of undermining by corporations and a complicit state, contemporary unions have been hampered by “decades of bureaucratization and business unionism” and are now, in many cases, simply, “not up to the fight,” as Burns told C.J. Polychroniou in an interview with Truthout. “Many opted for accommodation with employers in labor management programs rather than fighting our way out of the problem.”

In his books Class Struggle Unionism and Strike Back, Burns has made a convincing and influential case for militant and active leaderships and rank-and-file and grassroots labor action that does not always conform to frameworks imposed from the top down; those frameworks, after all, have been designed and installed to systematically sap labor of its primary weapon. This is “class struggle unionism” — i.e. organizing that is rooted in an understanding of capital’s antagonism to labor, over more accommodationist tactics.

It is time, many would argue, for public employee unions, now facing a potentially existential threat, to surpass self-imposed boundaries in response. A 2023 strike at Rutgers University by three unions, Rutgers AAUP-AFT, Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union and AAUP-Biomedical and Health Sciences of New Jersey, was notable for being a major action by employees of the public university — the first strike in Rutgers’s over 250 years. After five days, the historic walkout won a new contract with 43 percent and 33 percent pay raises for adjunct professors and graduate student workers, respectively. The effort was led by a newly militant adjunct union that pursued a strike in lieu of the less organizing-focused bargaining of previous leaderships, representative of a wave of militant nontenured adjunct and graduate student organizing at the time.

The power of a union ultimately reduces to its ability to threaten and act on the stoppage of work. Engaging that power is far easier said than organized and done, of course. Still, it’s worrying to feel like this time around we may be erring on the side of the timid, passive and (if understandably) scared. Yet we’re at a time when the only thing that seems appropriate is for everyone to make the loudest noise that they possibly can. These are uniquely threatening and extenuating circumstances.

“None of [Trump’s] Republican predecessors in the White House for the past half century ever considered doing something this outrageous.… Through every step of an increasingly aggressive series of tests of the labor movement’s power, the administration has learned that there are no real consequences,” Nolan writes. Capital speaks only the language of profit. The only thing it fears is that profit’s interruption.

Burns, Nolan, and others in this dire moment are calling upon organized labor to again realize its fundamental structural power, and to cease to play by the rules of an already rigged game — rules that the Trump administration has stopped even making a show of respecting. It is time for labor to answer in kind. “We need a fundamentally different type of labor movement. One willing to violate the restrictions of labor law, confront the powers that be and is deeply rooted in the working class,” as Burns told Truthout:

When workers get in motion, great things can happen. Whether it be private sector workers in the 1930s or public employees in the 1960s, when workers begin striking in large numbers, they can quickly transform the landscape.… Only class struggle unionism, with its worker-led militancy and willingness to challenge the status quo, holds any hope for changing the political equation.

The cause of labor remains the hope of the world. That hope remains, if we can seize it. Beyond union members, we should hope that all organizers, protesters and everyday people can access a sense of their own power, as the moment calls for nothing less than everything we’ve got. At this juncture, perhaps we should remind ourselves of all that is now on the table. The future of collective bargaining and workers’ rights in the United States is one thing. Another is the scale of human harm and suffering that is being inflicted and that we must allay amid the reckless closures, layoffs, funding cuts and administrative havoc. Solidarity against that suffering is all we have and all we need.