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Are you a federal worker who has been asked for those infamous “fork-in-the-road” memos—or your resignation? Are you a state or local public employee bracing for the fallout from President Donald Trump going nuclear on the public services he was entrusted to govern?
Either way, the destruction of vital services for millions of Americans has begun—and so has an uprising to stop it.
Within hours of his inauguration, Trump began a vindictive, erratic and often illegal series of moves intended to demolish the federal government. Aided by his unelected henchman Elon Musk, Trump locked some federal workers out of their offices and terminated others using dismissal letters that falsely accused them of incompetence. At the same time, the executive branch froze federal programs authorized and paid for by Congress.
Right in the middle of this mess stand the 5,500 federal employees represented by the Federation of Indian Service Employees, an affiliate of the AFT that represents workers at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Bureau of Indian Education, the Bureau of Trust Funds Administration and the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs.
These FISE members carry out all kinds of programs serving Native Americans across 26 states, and most of them are Native American themselves. In addition to their mission of teaching and supporting education, FISE members fight wildfires, run computer networks, do social work and keep the drinking water pure.
Musk’s decisions already have ripped dozens of AFT public employees away from their careers—and in just as erratic a fashion, the federal Office of Personnel Management may now have reinstated some of them. After Trump told his Cabinet members on March 6 that they, not Musk, have control over their agencies, 25 workers employed by the BIE will be returned to work.
A Native American ecosystem
About 40 FISE members who worked at the Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas and about 20 members who worked at the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in New Mexico had their jobs terminated Feb. 14 without notice. Worse, a federal job freeze prevents them from seeking other work in the federal government, which often is the best-paying or only employment to be found in rural areas.
“This has just devastated so many of our employees,” says FISE President Sue Parton. “We are gathering facts and working closely with the AFT and other unions to coordinate a powerful response to these unlawful firings.”
Normally, the union would look for relief from the Merit Service Protection Board. But, as you may have guessed, Trump has already gutted that board. And the Department of the Interior, which oversees federal lands and Native American schools, has been remarkably uncommunicative with FISE about what’s going on.
Some FISE members do their jobs in remote areas, including on reservations and in pueblos, while others work in mostly Western and Midwestern cities. Many FISE members are employed by tribal schools and colleges as faculty, instructors and staff. Many others are employed in a wide range of public services—a structural relationship between Native Americans and the U.S. government established in the late 1800s when peace treaties between sovereign Indian nations and the federal government stopped their wars.
These treaties exchanged Native territories for a U.S. pledge to protect Native people forever, Parton explains. In exchange for peace, she says, “our ancestors paid with their land. Our ancestors paid with their lives.”
Today, with this betrayal by the Trump administration, Parton says fear has gripped the remaining employees. Even before the job terminations, Parton thinks many FISE members may have accepted the administration’s “fork directive,” ostensibly a buyout, fearing there would be worse treatment of federal employees ahead.
Attacks on democracy and the law
No one voted for Musk and his henchmen, says AFT President Randi Weingarten, yet they continue to block federal funding streams, take a sledgehammer to programs and rifle through sensitive taxpayer data in what they describe as “mass head-count reductions” and a “drastic” dismantling of rules that displease them—all in violation of transparency requirements under the Federal Advisory Committee Act.
Their secret schemes to remake the government disregard not only democracy, but the law, Weingarten says. The harms to tribal communities include a weakening of police and fire protection and an erosion of public lands.
In Congress, Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.), along with Democratic Sens. Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján, also of New Mexico, wrote to Trump and two of his Cabinet members demanding an immediate halt to funding freezes and a reversal of mass firings in tribal programs.
Stansbury was responding to her constituents, including Thomas De Pree, fired from the Department of Advanced Technical Education at Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in Albuquerque. De Pree had recently landed his dream job as an environmental science instructor until he was dismissed, effective immediately.
Along with several other first-year instructors at SIPI, De Pree had earned an “outstanding” performance rating. All of them had only two hours to clear out their offices. Although De Pree didn’t get to tell his students about his departure, some heard about it and helped him pick up the books and belongings he dropped in his haste.
“It broke my heart to see them in tears, not knowing whether they would have class next week or what the fate of their program would be,” De Pree wrote to Stansbury. “There are no other faculty at SIPI with the credentials to teach my courses, and there will be no new hires during the federal hiring freeze.”
Three of the four instructors who were fired have doctoral degrees in their subjects and were just beginning to revitalize defunct courses, raising student recruitment, retention and graduation. Their supervisors told them they’d achieved more improvements in a few months than SIPI had seen in a decade, and promised to hire them back as soon as possible.
“It was made clear to us that SIPI was not firing us,” De Pree wrote, noting that the job terminations were political. None of the instructors has received a letter of termination or any official documentation. But they still had to turn in their keys.
Message to Trump: ‘No Kings’
Even as concerned Americans are joining in thousands of “No Kings” protests that started on Presidents Day and continued with Protect Our Kids rallies on March 4, working people must stay vigilant and be prepared to act as more anti-union and anti-worker orders are issued. Real-time analysis of these unprecedented executive orders can be found at Democracy Forward’s Executive Order Response Center, an alliance of labor, justice and civil rights groups.
The AFT is working with Democracy Forward and the AFL-CIO to fight the president’s actions. The AFL-CIO has launched the Department of People Who Work for a Living, a new campaign to hold Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency accountable.
Democracy Forward has filed more than two dozen legal actions since Jan. 20 to halt Trump’s orders, including the unlawful and arbitrary “fork” directive that supposedly offered “deferred resignation” for federal employees. Meanwhile, the AFT has won several temporary court orders to halt Trump’s clear-cutting of services.
As if all of this isn’t enough, the federal government is approaching another shutdown. If a budget deal hasn’t been reached by March 14, most of the employees FISE represents face furloughs with no pay. A possible reduction in force hangs over their heads as well. If either furloughs or layoffs come to pass, 574 federally recognized tribes will suffer great wrongs to their elders, children and future generations. Stay tuned.
[Annette Licitra]