The real fight against Elon’s coup has begun
It started on Sunday. Nearly 100 Federal workers took part in a protest against Elon Musk’s takeover of the Office of Personnel Management. They were joined by DC residents, organizers, and protesters who came out to support them. These people self-organized and mobilized against this quiet coup carried out by the richest man on Earth, who also happens to be a Nazi. As one person, a long-time DC protester, reported, they might have held off some of Musk’s minions, stopping them from entering the building for several hours. John Zangas confirms that the federal workers and their supporters blocked the doors to the OPM building when a handful of self-identified ‘data miners’ waited to be admitted to the building.
This group, this protest that took direct action and may have sparked something powerful and necessary in people across the U.S., stayed late into the night, and more people leaped up, self-organized, and got out there. They were able to do that because there’s a solid foundation in D.C. of people who have been organizing and getting into motion for years. They’ve been at this work since Trump round 1 and before. They’ve taken to the streets for Black Lives, fought Proud Boys, and when they heard news of Musk’s quiet coup they were, evidently, ready to get into action.
If you’re not sure why people would be trying to block the federal Office of Personnel Management late on a Sunday night, Waleed Shaheed summed it up, “In just the past few days, Musk’s hand-picked agents have seized control of Treasury’s 6 trillion payment system, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and the General Services Administration (GSA)—institutions that, together, function as the central nervous system of the U.S. government.”
Another piece, the most comprehensive on the quiet coup so far, comes from Nathan Tankus, who outlines how the highest-ranking civil servant in the Treasury Department was put on leave because he wouldn’t give Musk’s team his compliance, or his immense knowledge of the inner workings of the Treasury payment systems. Tankus says, “I do believe that it is the case that Musk and his team are not yet near having ‘operational capabilities.’ The key word is ‘yet.’” And they’re still working on that “yet.” They’re trying to gain access to the code underlying the payments in and out of the entire U.S. government. As Tankus continues, “Musk and his cronies are clearly aiming to redesign the payments system to serve their agenda.”
This is a crisis. It’s a constitutional crisis, one which already began when Trump illegally decided to halt appropriations designated by Congress, and one which is rapidly expanding. Tankus concluded his superb and harrowing piece by saying, “There is nothing more important on the entire planet than getting Elon Musk and DOGE out of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service and allowing career civil service employees to run the Treasury’s internal payments system without capricious and self-serving interference from billionaires and their allies.”
I don’t need to convince you that the richest guy on Earth, who supports German Nazis and white replacement theory, hates trans people (including his own daughter), and who has bought his way into immense power, shouldn’t have the code and the processes of the treasury department. DOGE, his semi-governmental organ that doesn’t legally exist, hasn’t been voted on by the people or by Congress. In short, none of this should be happening at all. And yet it is. This coup has been swift, and although it isn’t complete it’s gotten alarmingly far. Musk and his minions, most of whom appear to have no qualifications other than loyalty to their fascist billionaire boss, and many of whom appear to be young Nazis themselves, must be stopped. Now.
Federal workers and D.C. organizers were the first to step up and meet this moment. While Democratic leadership dithered, workers and residents mobilized. Then, members of Congress began to take action. Now Senator Brain Schatz says he’s putting a blanket hold on all of President Trump’s State Department nominees until USAID is back up and running. He and other members of Congress also went to USAID headquarters Monday, where Senator Chris Van Hollen said, among other things, that members of Congress were blocked from entering a federal building on the orders of Elon Musk.
The need to fight back is as clear as it’s ever been. And elected officials are starting to ramp up their efforts, but the truth is that the federal workers and locals who led this charge, who took action before politicians mobilized, and who directly blocked the doors of the Office of Personnel Management must be our models, our launch point.
Multiple federal unions have already begun to fight Trump. Two massive public sector unions (AFSCME and AFGE) representing over 2 million workers have filed lawsuits against the administration, but we must see this as just the beginning. Workers have the power to control their workplaces. We see this most often during strikes, where it suddenly becomes obvious that if workers simply put their hands in their pockets the bosses can’t run the business anymore, to paraphrase Big Bill Haywood. The same is true for government, and we see this sometimes when garbage collectors or municipal clerks or teachers strike and schools or even whole cities come to a virtual standstill.
All of this is to say, it’s time for federal workers and their unions to get radical, quick. It might not come from leadership, who certainly didn’t condone the direct action at OPM the other day, but it can come from the workers themselves. It must. And it must come from us, supporting them and taking action with them. 40,000 people showed up in a call to oppose the Musk coup led by the Working Families Party and Indivisible. One of the results of that call was word going out to show up and protest at the Treasury Department at 5 p.m. Tuesday. That’s tonight, if you’re reading this the day it came out. Other protest calls have also been put out to meet there at 7:30 a.m. every day this week.
This is not the first call to action, and it will not be the last. Countless people are ready to fight back against Musk and Trump and the organizing to channel that readiness and rage into action is happening as we speak. Federal workers are organizing, DC residents are organizing, and across the country various forms of resistance are in motion. We need to get plugged into organizing, if we aren’t already, and take action alongside the masses of other people who are gearing up for this fight.
And it is a fight. I want to say that very plainly. Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and their little army of ghouls have declared war on federal workers and working-class people everywhere who depend on the billions and billions in federal funding that supports vital programs across the country. We might not have been prepared for this coup, we might have been caught unaware by this attack, but it’s here, now, and we’re in it whether we like it or not. So now the question is, are we willing to fight back in a way that matches the intensity of this onslaught?
The answer might come easy to you. You might answer affirmatively and go out to a protest. But I’m here to tell you that’s not enough. An unelected fascist billionaire seizing crucial, central facets of government operation doesn’t just demand one protest, or two, or three. It demands resistance and fight-back on a scale and in a mode we have become unaccustomed to. A century ago, workers were used to knock-down, drag-out fights. Workers were murdered in the mines of Colorado, Montana, and West Virginia. They were killed and shed blood in factories and on picket lines and in the streets of Michigan and Georgia and California and Illinois and New York. Workers fought in every corner of this country. They were killed for asserting their right to a union, to basic safety, or simply for fighting for an 8-hour day. And they kept fighting.
The Elon Musks of the world want us to believe that the fight only starts when we hit back. But that’s never the beginning. The capitalist class is in a perpetual state of war against workers. They are constantly union-busting, exploiting, trying to roll back regulations, trying to take more power and reduce ours. Elon Musk’s quiet coup is just the latest, and most blatant assault in a much longer war.
We’ve fought before and it’s time to fight again. We didn’t start this, but we can end it. It’s going to take thinking and acting far outside the box, just as our enemies are. Musk & Co. don’t care for rules, laws, or any order besides their fascist supremacist order. They’re as far outside the box as they can get, and we need to meet them on that battlefield. They’ll keep trying to operate under the veneer of the law, but that facade is quickly crumbling. This is no-holds-barred, this is the time for federal workers and people everywhere to seize power, to build power, to resist and fight in ways that are unprecedented in recent memory.
There are countless ways to fight. Some folks will flood OPM and other DC locations where Elon’s coup is manifesting, like USAID and reportedly the Department of Education. Others will organize toward a general strike. Others will unionize their workplaces and their neighbors. Federal workers will try to move and radicalize their unions into the responses that this moment demands. Others will pressure Democratic politicians to act. Some will organize their neighbors, some will file lawsuits, and some will take more direct actions to shut down the coup.
Every action matters, as long as it’s meeting this moment at the scale and gravity that a coup by a Nazi billionaire demands. It may take grinding DC to a halt, it may take many more physical blockades of Musk’s minions, it may take the sort of fight we never thought we’d find ourselves participating in, just as we might’ve never suspected we see a quiet coup like this in Washington. The exact tactics we ultimately use to fight back and win are not yet clear, but what is clear is that the real resistance has begun, and it’s on us to see it through.
A few resources. First, a recording of the 40,000-person call the other night:
Two links for federal workers who want to push their unions: https://labornotes.org/2020/03/union-reform-its-not-one-person-show
And: https://labornotes.org/sites/default/files/Democracy-is-power-full-2.0-compressed_0.pdf
A guide to pressuring Democrats to grind business to a halt: https://indivisible.org/resource/how-senate-democrats-can-shut-down-trumps-agenda-procedural-hardball
And read more about how federal workers and supporters started the fight-back: https://dcmediagroup.us/2025/02/02/federal-workers-block-doors-of-admin-building-over-elon-musk-data-breach/
My biggest fear is this becoming a semantics battle and with it, an attempt to minimize the damage that has been done and what is to come next. This is a coup. It doesn’t have to be a visual of the Marines storming the White House.
It is an unlawful seizure of power; they know what they are doing and they are hoping the media reacts to it like Musk’s salute.
Thank you for this excellent article with so much good information to understand what’s happening and practical strategies to fight back.