Elon Musk may have shut down his “Twitter/X” building and fled San Francisco for Texas tax havens and unprecedented power in Trump’s White House, but on Wednesday evening outside his Tesla showroom on Van Ness Avenue, a few hundred protesters vociferously denounced Musk’s assault on public services and democratic government in a boisterous “Save Our Services” rally.
A man wearing a Musk mask and an office suit reprised the tech mogul’s infamous Nazi salute, while others foisted banners and signs proclaiming, “Deport Elon Immediately (DEI);” “We Love Federal Workers, They Protect Food, Water, Children;” “Federal Trans Lives Matter;” and “Stop the Coup, Join Us!” A group stationed in the median near the Muni bus lane held up a long black banner urging, “#DefendDemocracy.”
Organized by the Federal Unionists Network (FUN), the protest included federal workers and local labor leaders decrying the Trump administration’s attacks on democracy, public services, and workers. Protest organizer Mark Smith, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees Local 1 in San Francisco, described FUN as a “cross-union, cross-agency organization of rank-and-file activists” that’s working to “build a fighting federal-sector labor movement that can really fight back against these attacks on the public sector and build a government that works for working people.”
Smith, an occupational therapist who treats veterans for the VA, said the Musk/Trump slashing of government “is not just an attack on federal workers, it really is an attack on public services that everybody relies on, social services, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, all these things that help people just get by, worker protections, all those things.”
The Trump administration’s massive cuts of thousands of federal workers—including VA workers who staff the veterans’ crisis line, data management, and safety and emergency management—are “harmful to the people that we serve. I’m a healthcare provider. When you go to your health care provider, you don’t want them thinking about whether they’re going to have a job next week. You want them laser focused on your care.”
“We worry about our patients, and we want to make sure that we’re able to take the best care possible of our nation’s veterans, and this kind of chaotic administration by a billionaire is not something that we signed up for and it’s not something that we’re going to put up with.”
Smith described “emails going out telling people that they should resign, kind of trying to pressure them into it, telling people that they’re low productivity, public sector workers. These are physicians and highly skilled nurses and rehabilitation professionals, you know, who can make more money in the private sector, but they come to the VA because they can do public service, take care of veterans. Our folks are there for the mission.”
Olga Miranda, president of the Service Employees International Union local 87, lambasted “The arrogance of a billionaire saying he is here to clean up our country, but he is also taking advantage of the beautiful open arms this country has, but only for a few… Elon Musk came to the Twitter building a few years back to say he was going to clean up everything, and I never saw the son of a bitch pick up a broom or a vacuum,” she said as the crowd cheered loudly.
Musk isn’t just coming for federal workers, Miranda warned. “We don’t have the luxury to wait ‘til someone comes for us, this is the moment that you were warned about. They are coming for every single one of us,” she told the crowd, adding, “We gotta organize the ones that were never represented by the community, the ones that thought a Trump vote was going to make them win, when they were never part of the plan.”
With Trump’s crackdown on immigrants, many union members “are feeling, should I leave my home today or not?” Miranda said. “It’s important that we all stand up, not just contemplate, the wounds of this administration—we have to act.”
Hai Binh Nguyen, an enforcement attorney with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, described how her agency was “completely shut down” by Musk, hit by rounds of mass layoffs, the cancelling of $100 million contracts. Consumer complaint call centers that receive 500,000 complaints a month were shuttered, too, she told us. All her investigations are on hold.
Nguyen told us, “I love my job and I love what we do, I am very proud of the work that we do, and it makes me very angry that we don’t get to do that anymore. It’s not just because it’s about our job, but because what we do is for the public good and we are the wall against the scammers out there, and we don’t get to do that anymore.”
