‘It’s not Elon versus government, it’s Elon versus everyone’: A dire warning from fired federal workers

In this urgent episode of Working People, we focus on the Trump-Musk administration’s all-out assault on federal workers and its takeover and reordering of our entire system of government. “At least 20,000 federal workers have so far been fired by the Trump administration,” Ed Pilkington and Chris Stein report in The Guardian, “most of them recent hires on probationary periods who lack employment protections. In addition, the White House claims that more than 75,000 employees have accepted its offer of deferred resignations. The purge has prompted speculation that Trump is engaging in one of the biggest job cutting rounds in US history, which could have a powerful knock-on effect on the American economy.” In today’s episode, we take you to the front lines of struggle and hear directly from three federal workers about what is happening inside the federal government, why it concerns all of us, and how federal workers and concerned citizens of all stripes are fighting back. Panelists include: Cat Farman, president of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Union, Local 335 of the National Treasury Employees Union; Jasmine McAllister, a rank-and-file CFPB Union member and data scientist who was illegally fired two weeks ago; and Will Munger, a rangeland scientist who works across the intermountain west and who, until this month, served as a postdoctoral researcher with the USDA Agricultural Research Service. 

Additional links/info: 

• CFPB Union website, 
• Federal Unionists Network website, Bluesky page, and Instagram  
• 5Calls.Org website 
• Ed Pilkington & Chris Stein, The Guardian, “US personnel office walks back email ultimatum from Musk to workers”
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “Elon Musk is making technofascism a reality before our eyes”
• Democracy Now!, “‘Grand Theft Government’: Federal workers send SOS over Musk’s DOGE, mass firings & service cuts”
• Emily Anthes & Apoorva Mandavilli, The New York Times, “Mass federal firings may imperil crops, cattle and pets”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

---

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximilian Alvarez and we’ve got an urgent episode for y’all. Today we are focusing on the Trump Musk administration’s all out assault on federal workers in the United States Constitution and its takeover and reordering of our entire system of government. We are recording today’s episode on Monday, February 24th, and things just keep getting more hectic, absurd, and terrifying by the minute. As Ed Pilkington and Chris Stein reported this morning in the Guardian quote, at least 20,000 federal workers have so far been fired by the Trump administration, most of them recent hires on probationary periods who lack employment protections.

In addition, the White House claims that more than 75,000 employees have accepted its offer of deferred resignations. The purge has prompted speculation that Trump is engaging in one of the biggest job cutting rounds in US history, which could have a powerful knock on effect on the American economy. Now, this already chaotic situation got even more chaotic this weekend when as Pilkington and Stein continue, Elon Musk, the Tesla billionaire turned White House sanctioned cost cutter demanded federal workers detail what they do at their jobs in bullet points or faced dismissal. The Saturday email sent to millions of employees was the latest salvo in Musk’s campaign authorized by Donald Trump to dramatically downsize the federal government. Musk’s Ultimatum was sent out on Saturday in a mass email to federal employees from the Office of Personnel Management, one of the first federal organs, Musk and his team on the so-called Department of Government Efficiency infiltrated after Trump was sworn in, the message gave all the US governments more than 2 million workers, barely 48 hours to itemize their accomplishments in the past week in five bullet points and in a post on X Musk indicated that failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.

The order provoked instant chaos across the government with Trump’s own appointed leadership in federal agencies responding in starkly different ways, workers in the Social Security Administration and the Health and Human Services Department were told to comply with the email. And CNN reported that the Department of Transportation ordered all of its employees to respond to the musk email by its deadline that included air traffic controllers who are currently struggling with severe understaffing and a spate of recent accidents. Several other agencies told their employees to refrain, including the FBI, where the new director Trump Loyalist Cash Patel asked agents to please pause any responses. Now, this is a fast moving crisis with long-term consequences that concern all of us, but we cannot understand this crisis if we are swimming in seas of misinformation and if our mainstream media channels and our social media feeds are just not giving us the information that we need, or they’re actively suppressing our access to the voices of current and former federal workers who are on the front lines of struggle right now and on this show and across the Real News Network, we are doing everything we can to counteract that.

And that’s exactly what we’re doing today to help us navigate this mess and to help us figure out how we can fight back before it’s too late, not as red or blue or non-voters, but as fellow working people, the working class of this country, I’m honored to be joined today on the show by three guests. Kat Farman is president of the CFPB Union, which is local 3 3 5 of the National Treasury Employees Union, and they represent workers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or the CFPB, the agency that was created to protect consumers after the 2008 financial crisis and subprime mortgage lending scandal, an agency that was effectively shut down by the Trump Musk administration two weeks ago after having clawed back over $21 billion from Wall Street banks and credit card companies for defrauded customers. We are also joined by Jasmine McAllister, a rank and file CFPB Union member and a data scientist before she was illegally fired two weeks ago, along with around 180 employees at the CFPB.

And last but not least, we are joined by Will Munger. Will is a rangeland scientist who works across the Intermountain West and around the world. Before the Valentine’s Day massacre, he served as postdoctoral researcher with the USDA Agricultural Research Service. Kat Jasmine will thank you all so much for joining us today, and I really, really wish that we were connecting under less horrifying circumstances, but I’m so grateful to have you all here with us and in the first 15 minutes here, I want to start with where we are right now as of this recording on Monday, February 24th. By the time this episode comes out later this week, we’ll presumably know more about the fallout from Musk’s absurd mandate to federal workers this weekend and about who complied and who didn’t. I wish it could be taken for granted that people see right through all of this, that they see federal workers like yourselves as human beings and understand the incalculable impact that this techno fascist coup and all these firings are going to have on all of us that they see Musk and his drugged out, neo-Nazi insane clown, CEO posts and nakedly self-serving corrupt behavior, and they see him for what he is and that they see the Trump administration and all this oligarch led destruction and reordering of our government, our economy, and our society to serve their profit and power motives.

But we know that we can’t take that for granted because Musk Trump, Fox News and the entire ripe wing media apparatus, the social media algorithms controlling our feeds, they’re all pushing the narrative that this is righteous vengeance against the anti-American deep state against wokeness and waste, and a lot of people are buying it. So can we start by going around the table, having y’all briefly introduce yourselves and walk listeners through what this has all looked like for you three over the past week or so and what you want people to know about what’s actually happening to our government in real life in real time?

Cat Farman:

Yeah, thank you, max. Thanks for having us and thanks for being a voice for working people and for the working people who are under attack, specifically in public services working for our federal government. And that includes not just federal workers, but people who work at contractors. There are a lot of private contracting businesses that people are losing their jobs there because Musk is attacking those jobs too. There’s a lot of working people under attack right now. So I’ve been working at the CFPB now for 10 years, and when I got this job, I was excited because I had been working in tech before that, going from small company to small company, just trying to get my foot in the door and prove myself and also get compensated for the work that I do. And one of the things that I struggled with working in the private sector was I wasn’t really finding a lot of opportunities where I live in Philadelphia and the opportunities that did exist were very corporate in nature.

It was a lot of building websites and application software for companies like Ben and Jerry’s or Papa John’s, and those are kind of cool, fun projects to do. But it felt like what it was, which is I’m just being exploited to create something for someone else’s profit, and I’m spending a lot of my life and my time building and crafting very detail oriented code bases and designs for someone to just sell pizza, and it didn’t feel very useful. So I was really excited to find that the folks at CFPB were hiring and that it was to do work using my skills and my technology background to actually provide a socially useful service to the public. So I’ve worked on projects like the consumer complaint database website, which is where before two weeks ago, any person in the USA who had an issue with your big bank, your financial service provider, your mortgage lender or servicer, your student loan servicer, if they were not responding to you because they don’t, right?

They have bad customer service experiences on purpose. They want you to give up. Instead, you can come to the CFPB, you used to be able to submit a complaint or call us, do it on our website and we would require a response from the company in two weeks. That is not happening anymore, but that’s the kind of service that I got to work on and use my skills for good. So we were talking about someone like me who grew up in small town in East Texas, and I was lucky to have internet growing up in that small town. And then to get to use those skills and have a career in that, but find the jobs are wanting few and far between, don’t pay as well as we were told tech skills can get and they’re kind of miserable. And then to be able to come into public service and actually give something back with those skills and know that all the time and effort I’m putting, working 40 hour work weeks or longer, it’s actually doing something useful for society.

That was just a huge shift in my career that I was so excited about and coming into working at the bureau, been there for 10 years, and then realizing also a lot of the benefits that I in my head always ascribe to a government job, stability, security, a decent pay, even if it’s not as high as a private sector, but it’s going to be enough benefits like retirement. We have a pension. These things that I associated with government jobs, they come from unions. It was actually our union contract that got us those and unions fought and won those and have protected those. And unions remain under attack for decades. And in the federal work sector, it’s one of the last sectors that’s got higher than average numbers of unionization. I think it’s still only a third of the sector that’s unionized though, right? So it’s like 34% instead of 10% of Americans in general, but it’s still a higher percentage.

So I learned a lot about unions. This is the first union job I had all the things that made my family from Texas really excited that here I was. I moved to the big city far away and then I was able to get a good stable government job. They knew what that meant, all those things that represents to them. They come from unions and union contracts. So having that for the first time too had been just a total shift and getting involved in our union to fight to protect those things under the first Trump administration and then since to expand on them when we’ve had opportunities to, and then now here we are where the entire sector is under attack. It’s been eyeopening and it’s also been quite a joy to realize we rest on all this labor history that brought us here to where we are today, but also to see that we still have much to learn from that past if we’re going to be able to even survive the current moment.

We have this revived labor movement in this country and federal workers have been a part of that. CFPB union is a part of that. And I believe that is one reason we’re under attack right now. And that’s something that I hope listeners understand that we’re being targeted because we’re unions, because we’re labor and that these attacks are on the right wing that are trying to paint us as faceless DC bureaucrats or suits in Washington are lies meant to obscure the reality, which is where are your neighbors, where your family, your friends, where your community members who are working people and our services that we provide serve working people. We provide those services to the public for free funded by the government. And that means Elon Musk can’t make a buck off of it. And so when he comes in to shut down the CPB to steal our data and to fire our workers illegally when we are the ones who would be regulating his payment processing plans for x.com, it’s because he doesn’t want us standing in the way of him making a buck. And he has no need for any public services for people who are just working, people who want public goods to be provided to them so that they can have a little bit of a shot against the big that we regulate or the financial companies, what Elon wants to be.

That is what he’s doing. He’s seeing no value in the public services that federal workers provide, and if he can’t make a buck off it, then he’s going to find a way. Yeah.

Jasmine McAllister:

Thanks Max. Thanks for having us. Yeah, I wanted to address the first part of what you were asking. So you had mentioned this language that it’s like anti wokeness and the deep state and waste and all of that. And to be honest, I think that’s a distraction and that’s just excuses that they’re using to do what they really want. When you think about who these people are, they have dedicated their whole lives to accumulating wealth and power. They want to keep doing that. It’s like a machine that can’t be satisfied and they’re bad bosses. They’ll make people work in factories in a natural disaster. You think of tech jobs as being cushy, but then once people start to get more bold and organize and try to start unions at their tech companies like mass layoffs, no, it’s not stable. So yeah, I think that they do really want to attack the idea that you can have a stable, dignified job.

It might not make as much money as you could elsewhere, but it’s stable contributes to public life. That idea is threatening to who they are as bosses and what they are in the labor market. So I think that’s threatening to them as well as just organized labor in general. So their strategy to execute on destroying organized labor, destroying the federal services, destroying the federal workforce and making them the only big bad bosses in town. Their strategy to do that is to cause chaos and confusion. So you’d mentioned some headlines from this weekend and yeah, I think maybe you also mentioned that I was legally fired two weeks ago that firing was illegal. I feel like the news is covering it as layoffs. It’s something that’s allowed to happen as routine. It is possible to have a reduction in force in the federal government, but it needs to be thoughtful.

There’s rules and processes for how this is normally followed. If you want to take that kind of action and do it thoughtfully, which they’re completely ignoring, and in terms of what it looks like on the ground, it does feel chaotic and confusing, especially when it’s kind of hard to sort your attention because I feel like I’ll try to be like, okay, a lot’s happening, but I’m going to focus on what I can do and what’s in front of me and what’s in my control. But then I’ll get texts from like, oh, my parents, they saw a headline and they’re like, oh, did you know Elon Musk is saying people resign if they don’t reply to this email? But Elon Musk is not in our chain of command. That’s something that I think is being covered as just a fact when that’s not anyone’s boss. And you’ve seen a diversity in responses from different agencies. And

Maximillian Alvarez:

In fact, if this were in a bizarro world where Republicans did not have a trifecta control of the government, you would have folks on the other side of the aisle screaming about the illegality of all of this. But essentially what the culmination of that GOP trifecta is, is that no one in Congress is doing anything about the blatantly illegal actions of the unelected richest man in the world taking a meat cleaver to our government agencies.

Jasmine McAllister:

Exactly. Yeah. And I think in the absence of leadership from Congress, I think it’s really on each of us as individuals either as federal workers or just American citizens, to do what’s within each of our individual power. So one thing that our union has been really good about is reminding people their rights and their obligations in terms of legal orders. And so one thing that we’ll say is there’s all these rules about what sort of information can be shared where and who gets access to what. And there’s a lot of details there, but if you’re a federal worker listening to this, just remembering I do what my boss tells me to do, and if I’m getting an order from someone who’s not at my agency or not in my chain of command, I ask my boss, is this an order? And I think it violates x, y, Z rules and they can correct you, but don’t do anything that’s illegal and don’t comply. Don’t be scared into complying just because you’re scared. They’re trying to cause chaos and confusion. It’s working, but we need to remain clear-eyed about what our processes are to make our democracy work.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Will I want to bring you in here. We had Kat and Jasmine giving their on the ground accounts of the past couple weeks. I’m wondering what that looked like from your vantage point, not being in DC, but being directly impacted by this same top-down takeover.

Will Munger:

Sure. Well, thanks for having us on Max and Jasmine and Kat, my heart goes out too. And solidarity, this has been a really hard week for everyone. We’re definitely all in this together. I want to paint you a picture of the landscape where I work. I work and live in rural Idaho and Montana. I work with mostly ranchers who are working on public lands as well as the public land managers who are responsible for those public lands, as well as a number of scientists who are doing research and science for the betterment and management of those public lands. And so in my day-to-day job, I talk with ranchers about the issues that are facing them. These are complex issues in the west, there’s multiple jurisdictions, and it’s not just about producing food and fiber for the American people, but also there’s a number of new ask that are being asked of farmers and ranchers to conserve biodiversity, to help mitigate climate change, to deal with rapidly changing rural communities and land fragmentation.

So the challenges facing America’s farmers and ranchers are numerous, and having a federal agricultural research service is so important because we can do public interest research that the private sector isn’t able to do. And so me and my team were actually on our way back from the Society for Range Management meeting where we had been talking with ranchers and public land managers from around the country when we got the call that we were getting fired. And we were actually really shocked and surprised is so many people were. But one thing that I think is unique about my experience is I’m a young scientist. This is my first year in the service. I defended my dissertation in April of last year. And like Kat was talking about, to come from a rural community be able to have a federal job is and be able to serve your community is something that’s really important.

And a lot of young people are really excited to be here because day in day out, we hear from our stakeholders about how important the work that we do is. And when we got the news that we had been fired, it was just a real shock for us because we had been at this conference where we were getting really great feedback while we were hearing from our stakeholders that we were performing at a very high level and actually addressing a lot of the challenges that they’re facing. So it’s pretty dispiriting. But I think the thing I really want to uphold and really call attention to is the impact that these mass terminations have on rural communities out west. A lot of these communities are public lands communities where the people that were fired in this live and work in their livelihoods are interwoven with these lands, these rangers, firefighters, and also locksmiths, mule packers, educators. It’s a real range of people that have been hit by these. And some ranger districts that I’ve heard from have lost 50% of their crews, entire trail crews have been decimated. And over the last week, there’ve been a number of protests in these small towns. This is McCall, Idaho, Flagstaff, Arizona, my hometown of Logan, Utah. Hundreds and thousands of people are coming out in these small towns to say, Hey, these are public servants who serve our interest, who are taking care of our public lands, and we’re going to stand up for them.

Our stakeholders have been really active in making calls to the higher powers it be. And I think this is important because these are no democrats. These are mostly red states. These are mostly conservative agricultural communities, and they feel like projects that they have put a lot of time and effort into are being attacked here. And I think that that’s really important to recognize is that this is a moment where we can really bridge the urban rural divide and listen to each other and really think about what is the point of public science, of public service and what are the goods that brings? And I think this is a real clarifying moment. And the other thing I want to really highlight is the impact to young workers. I coached the range team at Utah State. I’m in contact with a number of young workers around the west, and they are really feeling decimated where these entry level jobs, these probationary positions that were terminated, this is our pathway where young people find their place in the world and can be compensated and rewarded for serving their communities.

And to cut that off is really cruel and not efficient at all. And here’s the real deep irony about calling this governmental efficiency is that so many of these programs are because of years of experience that this works. We responded to the Dust Bowl by creating conservation districts and watershed science so that we don’t have the impact of the Dust Bowl anymore. And our public land servants who are working on the range of issues that our communities are facing are really public servants who deserve to be supported. And that’s why I think it’s so important that we’re raising our voice and making these connections between rural America and what’s happening back east and in our cities.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s take a quick step back and help listeners hear what we’ve been trying to get them to hear since the very first episode of this podcast that your fellow workers doing the unsung work that makes our whole society and economy run are human beings just like you. Can we go back around the table and have each of you just talk a bit more about how you personally got into doing this work, what that day-to-day work entailed before all of this madness with the second Trump administration and how that work contributed directly and indirectly to the public Good. I

Cat Farman:

Came into CFPB 10 years ago now as a web developer and technologist and looking for purpose. And I think that’s really common for people of the millennial generation. And we grew up in a time when we were told, if you go to college and find meaning and passion, there will be jobs and a good life waiting for you on the other side. And then we saw the lie of the 2008 financial crash and the great recession, and that was not the case and that there was no magical great American dream waiting for us after all. And in fact, to the extent that it ever existed, they were doing everything they needed and wanted to do to take away any of the foundations of that. And that includes bailing out corporations and big banks instead of American homeowners who lost their houses in that crisis and lost their jobs.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I feel I got to state, just as a disclaimer, as folks who listen to this show know my family was one of those, the very first interview I ever did on this show was with my dad, Jesus Alvarez, talking about what it was like for our family to lose the house that I grew up in. So I feel like I have to say that for if nothing else, to make the disclaimer, but also to make the point that this impacts millions and millions of us.

Cat Farman:

Yes. And so I hear Will speaking about how the fact that these jobs exist that we’re talking about, that will and Jasmine have been unjustly legally fired from now that these careers exist, that these services exist for the public good is because we’ve learned from past disasters, like you said, the Dust Bowl, that’s the Great Depression. And then with the Great Recession, one of the lessons was there needs to be actual oversight in a central agency of government of these Wall Street banks that they don’t crash the economy and screw over the American people on such a scale again. And that includes regulating the mortgage market and auto loan market lenders and financial products. And that’s what CFPB was created to do. So I hear a lot of patterns, a lot of these services. There were a reason that we were created was because there was a moment, a history of greed and disaster resulting from that greed. And so here we are again. Greed is attacking these and creating disastrous economic effects already on American people. So we already know this history, it’s repeating. We’re in this new gilded age where the billionaires are running away with everything again and seeing if they’ll get away with it. So I think it’s important to remember that history and look back and see what’s going to be necessary for us to put a stop to this coup that’s happening and this corporate takeover of public good.

But yeah, so came to work at CFPB, it was in that context of the sort of disillusionment of being a working person realizing I’m going to have to work the rest of how long of my life and seeing the fallout of the economic, the great recession, and that impact on me and my generation friends and family members too. And again, Jasmine and Will talking about too, and then seeing opportunity in finding a public service job that’s got some security behind it, and that is meant to actually provide a social counterbalance, these forces of greed, corruption, corporate malfeasance, fraud by the billionaire and CEO class. So I’m still very proud to be able to do that work and it is motivating in a way that getting up in the morning to sell pizza every day is not and never was in those previous private sector jobs that I had.

One of the other differences I found too is that the small business tyrant experience is real. I worked for the small business tyrants at previous jobs and they have these little fiefdoms and there are not a lot of protections for workers in those kinds of jobs in this country. The difference is vast between working at those kinds of workplaces and going and working in public sector. And something too, and this is something shameful about some of these places I worked in technology, they shut out people of color, women of color, people like me from these industries, and I had never worked with a black coworker until I worked at the CFPB in technology. I never had a technology job where I had a black colleague in Philadelphia. So that kind of shameful discrimination and industry-wide creating hass and have nots who has access to certain kinds of work and salaries that come along with that, right? That’s something that in the public sector there are a lot more rules, regulations, and there’s a lot less segregation because of that. And I think that’s really key too, to keep in mind a part of the reason that we’re under attack right now is this is federal workforce is one of the more diverse and representative of the American people generally in all areas of demographics. And that is something that billionaires don’t want and certainly racist people like Musk and Trump are against too.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Jasmine, I want to come to you and ask if you could pick up where we left off and just say more about how you got into working at the CFPB, what that work entailed and how that work contributed to the public good.

Jasmine McAllister:

Yeah, so I was doing pretty similar work at the state level before coming to CFPB. So I was at the New York State Attorney General’s office similar to CFPB. CFPB has a law enforcement function among other functions. So I was doing law enforcement at the state level for all types of laws in New York state. So like labor laws, voting rights access or some of the things I worked on as well as consumer financial protection. So an everyday person when they interact with their auto lender, what sort of rice do they have and how do they make sure they’re not getting cheated? So that was the type of work I was doing beforehand and I spent many years building those skills up. It’s pretty complicated work. I’m a data scientist and when you investigate these companies, it’s not like they’re sitting around saying, yeah, sure, this is how we’re breaking the law.

It’s pretty complicated. The lawyers have to develop their legal theories and then they talk to us and we say, okay, what type of data might exist? If we look at that data, how can we tell what’s really happening? It’s usually millions of rows of data that we have to link together. So yeah, it’s a pretty specialized skillset that I developed elsewhere and it was pretty competitive to get the job. More than a thousand people applied to my posting and my team had four people hired from that thousand. So yeah, so it’s pretty complicated work and it’s pretty hard to find the skills for this. And all four of us, me and my coworkers, we had to take a technical test that was pretty difficult. We all hit the ground running right away, but then I talk about it being an illegal firing. The excuse that they gave is that it’s performance based. So for new hires, it is possible to fire them for performance based issues, but they fired all new hires in one day at 9:00 PM and it’s just not possible that all of us we’re not performing our jobs, and that’s really just a loophole that they’re trying to use to bully people, and it is illegal. What happened,

Cat Farman:

We have supervisors too who had no say in these firings, right? So your supervisor didn’t say your performance was bad. They didn’t even ask your supervisor because that wasn’t one. Yeah.

Jasmine McAllister:

Well, and my specific supervisor saw this coming. So my specific supervisor was proactively thought that this administration would do this and was sending emails up his chain of command all the way to the director saying, Hey, I know they’re going to try this tactic. These people I would vouch for. It was very difficult to hire them. His supervisor, supervisor agreed. Everyone who would normally have the power in a decision like this to evaluate performance has said no. The performance was extraordinary for these four people. And I think that’s true for all 180 of us who were fired. We have in writing, I have a proactive supervisor, but other people, there’s supervisors now are saying, I would be a reference. Their supervisors are posting on LinkedIn trying to help people get jobs. It’s clearly not performance based and they’re just trying to bully us.

So anyways, that was a tangent. But yeah, I’ve always been interested in holding power to account. I’ve always been interested in balancing out the power imbalances that exist in the world. And yeah, I’ve been doing that data work for a long time. I started doing it in CF PB six months ago. Some of the cases I’ve worked on since joining have to do with illegal overdraft fees. So one such case, it’s the biggest credit union in the country. They provide services to military families and they were doing this thing with illegal overdraft fees where it would say one balance in your account when you make the payment. So you’re like, okay, I’m at the grocery store, I’m looking at my basket. Can I afford this extra item? Oh, cool, I have $40 in my account. I’m going to make sure I’m under that $40. You pay your grocery bill and then the next day you see that actually the way that the transactions were posted in the order that they came in means that by the time that your $35 grocery bill hits your account, actually it was less than that by that time, and now you get an illegal overdraft fee.

So that’s not supposed to happen. That’s deceptive. And that’s something that CF PB got them to stop doing. And we won money for people who were cheated in this way. There were other things happening at this company too where you’re like, okay, cool, I need to buy something, but my friend owes me money. They send me a Zelle payment and then I buy the thing I need to buy, but actually the Zelle payment won’t be posted until the next business day. And that’s something that they were not forthcoming about disclosing. And these are military families. I think that that’s something that is a pretty sympathetic, I think that this sort of thing happens to people across the country and that’s why CPB exists to protect anyone. But the fact that this was happening to military families is an extra layer of they’ve served their country and now the institution that would protect them from this sort of predatory behaviors being abolished.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I mean it really underlines a point that we’ve been making throughout the conversation here that will brought up even earlier, right? It is like maybe people are cheering this kind of top-down government destruction on for partisan reasons, but it is going to have fully nonpartisan effects for all working people regardless of what state they live in. And will, I wanted to bring you back in here and ask if you could talk a bit more about the communities you serve, the work that you do there and how that work is as much in the public interest as what we’re talking about here with the CFPB, even if it’s not something that folks know about or see if they don’t live in a rural redder district.

Will Munger:

So the constituency that I work with are mostly ranchers who are working on a mix of both private and public lands. And on these public lands are multiple resources that are public. And so for example, there’s a huge demand for restoration of species like grizzly bears and wolves and bighorn sheep, which puts sometimes that into conflict with ranching families. So for example, there’s a disease transmission issue that happens between domestic and wild sheep that causes a pneumonia that can destroy wild sheep populations. And so doing really important genetic research, epidemiological research as well as community-based research to figure out how can we restore bighorn populations and have domestic sheep grazing, what’s the right combination? That’s one example of a lot of these complicated, both agricultural and public lands management issues, and obviously wolves and grizzly bears and the introduction of large carnivores in the Intermountain West is another huge issue that are impacting people.

And I think I also want to recognize that a lot of my stakeholders who I’ve been talking to and I’ve been doing qualitative research, interviewing a lot of people, so have a little bit of a grounds to stand on. They do see that there have been too many regulations. They do see their livelihoods diminished and they do want to see some reform. And so that is really important to acknowledge that that demand is out there as well. However, the group that I was working in was specifically created to address these complex public lines challenges by organizing collaborative science efforts rather than having a top-down loading dock model of science where a scientists say, oh, we have the silver bullet. Here’s what these communities have to do. We’re working with ranchers saying, what are the issues that are important to you and how can we work together to make science that is relevant to your livelihoods, to public lands, conservation issues, and be able to find that sweet spot?

And so our project has been years in the making. It takes a lot of work to build relationships both with livestock producers as well as environmental groups who have had conflict with those public land agencies and ranchers. So it takes a lot of time to build that trust and then it takes a really specialized set of specialized team that has geneticists, fire ecologists, social scientists, collaborative experts and facilitators to make these things happen. So these efforts take years and a lot of public investment to turn a page on these issues. And so when you come in and decimate that, that has a real impact on people.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been seeing letters from different wool grower organizations, different stockman’s organizations, different public lands, employee unions who are saying a very similar thing, which is these public servants are serving our interests, our livelihoods, our public lands, and we want to stand up for them because these projects have direct impact on our livelihood. And I think that’s the really important thing to drive home here, is that this is not a political game in the rural west. These are operators who are working on thin margins. These are wildlife populations that have been endangered and are in a route to recovery, and we need really innovative science to keep those things happening. The other part I think that is really important that goes back to some of the larger political economic changes, is that we’re seeing changes in public land ownership out west.

We’re seeing efforts to take over public land, and we are also seeing billionaires buying up working ranches and turning it into resorts, and it’s third and fourth and fifth and 14th homes. And so that both destroys working ranch livelihoods, but then also destroys that wildlife habitat. And so there’s I think, an opportunity to combine some convergences. Where can we build new political coalitions that can bring forth a vision of what might unite us, what might really help take care of rural communities going into the future? And so both Kat and Jasmine were talking earlier about it’s a little disorienting right now. There’s just so much new, so much feed, and that’s the flood the zone strategy, right? It’s the shock and awe that makes us just forget that we are in a web of relationships that are connected and responsible to each other. And so I think what I really want to emphasize is that our relationships make us strong. And whether that’s a union working in a big city, whether that’s a community group working out in the rural west, we need to uplift that next generation and continue to take care of each other during this hard time.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Kat, Jasmine will, there’s so much more I want to talk to you about, but I know we only have a little time left. And in that time I wanted to go back around the table and ask if you could say a little more about who’s fighting back right now and how, right? Is it unions, your unions, other unions will mentioned earlier that the stakeholders that you work with on a day-to-day basis or writing letters to the federal government urging them to not continue with these cuts, these layoffs, this top-down destruction. Are there elected officials who are leading a fight? Can you tell folks more about who’s fighting back and how? And I also wanted to ask by way of rounding out if you had any parting messages that you wanted to leave listeners with about why they need to care about all of this, how they can get involved in that fight, but also who and what we’re fighting against and who or what we’re fighting for here.

Cat Farman:

Well, thank you, max. We’re fighting for ourselves. One of my union comrades today put it perfectly. It’s not Elon versus government, it’s Elon versus everyone. This is about a billionaire and his rich buddies seizing power and getting rid of anything they cannot profit off of no matter the collateral damage because it does not personally affect him. What he doesn’t care. So that’s what’s at stake. And we’re not exaggerating when we say that. I think who’s organizing, who’s fighting back, who’s doing what, definitely I’ve seen workers being the first to sound the alarm, and we’ve tried to do that as well at CFUB Union. We know we’re under attack. We’ve been under attack since we were created because we regulate the biggest banks in the world and we give Americans money back when they get ripped off by these banks. We are the agency that sued Wells Fargo and got people money back from Wells Fargo fraud.

So of course we were under attack again under this second Trump administration. And so what’s gratifying is to see workers are still and continue to be fighting back every day and sounding the alarm about the implications for all of us not waiting for us to lose all these services before we sound the alarm and warn people. Now we know that social security, Medicare, Medicaid, these pillars of what’s left of a welfare state in this country that provides some security for people in old age or in ill health, that these are under attack and they’ll be in the next on the chopping block. So we have to fight back. We don’t really have a choice, right? People subsist on government public services because they’re public good. That was democratically created by the people for the people. That’s not to say that everything in government matches that ideal, and we’re always going to have to work hard to reach full democracy in this country and everywhere.

And that battle always seems to come down to the people versus the greedy, wealthy business owners who don’t care about democracy or public good because they can’t make money off of it. So what we’re doing is continuing to be in the streets and in the courts and everywhere where we need to be on the podcast, on the radio shows to sound the alarm, fight back, get people to join our fight. So CPB Union, we’re hosting pickets multiple times a week all over the country. One of the things that people don’t realize about this fight is that federal workers, most of us are outside of dc. It’s 80% of federal workers that work and live outside of the capital of Washington. So I think all of us on this show right now, we work and live outside of DC so we are representative of that and we are doing actions all across the country too.

So CFPB Union, we have workers in 40 states. We have a lot of folks who are the ones that go into banks to make sure that they’re following the law that live in rural communities, small towns, small cities, big cities all across the country if someone in Hawaii. So we have people everywhere. And what we’re doing along with our pickets DC and New York on Thursday is we’re also having events outside of our regional offices. That’s Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco. We are also going to Tesla dealerships where those are to bring the picket and the union and the fight to where Musk makes his money too. And we are going outside of the big banks. So everyone’s got a big bank in your town, no matter how small or there’s a big bank probably near you, you can go outside and info picket and tell people what’s going on.

Just tell people, did you know that this bank is operating lawlessly for the last two weeks because of Musk and this government corporate takeover that’s happening? That means that no one’s watching the big banks to make sure that they’re following the law. So if are you really going to trust your paychecks and your savings and your dollars with a bank that has zero oversight right now? That is what’s happening. The biggest banks in the country are not being supervised. The laws are not being enforced at those banks. We’ve been told to stop working. So for two weeks they’re operating without any oversight or accountability to the American public. So we invite folks to join us and post on social media. When you do that, spread the heat around where it belongs, do town halls and wherever you are, your local congress member needs to feel the heat bully your local Congress person, bully your local Republican. They need to take the heat for this and answer to what’s happening. What are they doing to stop it? Bully your local Democrat too.

Jasmine McAllister:

They all need to stop it.

Yeah, I definitely agree, Kat, you said that it’s not Elon Musk fighting the government. It’s really all of us fighting for ourselves. One thing that someone had mentioned to me this morning that I knew but kind of forgot just how many people are directly impacted by this, there’s us who work in the federal government, but also a lot of local state, local government, state government and nonprofits for land on federal funding as well. So in my role at the union, I’ve been trying to just build as many connections as possible either within the union or since I live in New York with other federal workers who live in New York, or after the conversation this morning, I’m like, I should try to figure out a way to build a relationship with people who are at these other levels of government or nonprofits that also their jobs are also on the line and their work is on the line and the services they provide to people might go away without this.

Yeah, and I think that’s related to what Will had said about our web of relationships making us strong. I think thinking about, okay, whose interests are aligned with mine? Who can be my allies, who can be in my coalition? And at a very broad level, I think that’s the whole 99%. I think they try to distract us with these different social issues and the different buzzwords, but it’s actually the 99% against the 1% or even the 0.01%. It’s a handful of guys versus the rest of us. So I think that, yeah, and this is maybe a tangent, but I feel like after the 2016 election in my more liberal leftist community, there was kind of a lot of chatter of talk to your racist uncle at Thanksgiving. And it’s like, that’s not what relationship building looks like and you’re just going to further push each other away if you have a big fight at Thanksgiving, I think about who you have access to and who you can influence and do that in a way that’s true and respectful to the relationship you have and the love that you hold for each other. I think that’s really important. And yeah, I mean I think there’s some of us who are in unions and can go through that bridge or our jobs are aligned, but there’s also people where it’s just like your family, whether or not they realize it does have interest aligned with you if they have to have a job to pay rent or a mortgage and eat food. So I think also just thinking about your relationships and then one quick plug, five calls.org makes it really easy to call your congress people and other representatives

Cat Farman:

Five calls.org to bully your local congress person.

Will Munger:

Well, I think those are some great steps and the town hall thing I think is really important right now, particularly in rural communities for folks who are impacted out west, showing up at these protests down at the courthouse, talking to your coworkers, talking to the folks at the bar, talking to the folks at your church. I just think we got to have this conversation from the bottom up. I’ve been reading a really great book by Robin Wall Kimer called The Service Ferrets about reciprocity and abundance in the natural world, and she’s a Potawatomi ecologist and really kind of brings a lot of indigenous science and to the table. And one thing that has really struck me in this web of relationships is whether it’s responding to climate change attacks by billionaires, pandemics, bottom up mutual aid where we’re taking care of each other, making sure no one falls through really, I think is that’s the jam in this social movement that’s got to come and whatever the political outcome, the more we can build relations with each other, with people who are different than us, who might speak a different language, who might have a job that’s different than ours.

I just think the powers that be these billionaires, they want us separated, they want us hating on each other and any way that we can find solidarity from the bottom up to reimagine how we get through this period together, but then also continue to thrive together in the face of all the challenges that we’re up against, I think that that’s something that we can be able to practice day in and day out and we’ve got to stick together on this one, I think.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guest, KA Farman, Jasmine McAllister and Will Munger. I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the real newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez, take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.