Federal Purge

TRACKING THE CRISIS
Week of February 1-6, 2025

Welcome to TRACKING THE CRISIS, a new weekly round-up from The Democracy Collaborative tracking the administrative, legislative, and other actions of the new Trump Administration as well as the many forms of legal and movement response from across a broad range of social, political and economic actors. TDC is providing this service for collective informational purposes, as a tool for understanding the times during a period of disorientingly rapid flux and change in the U.S. political economy. TDC should not be understood as endorsing or otherwise any of the specific content of the information round-up.

TRUMP TRACKER: Administration actions

• Trump Administration attempts to purge thousands of Federal employees. As the Thursday deadline for federal employees to accept Trump’s “Fork in the Road” buy-out loomed, a Federal judge temporarily blocked the buy-outs until Monday afternoon. By then, however, a White House source reported to Reuters that 60,000 Federal employees had apparently accepted the buy-out offer. Nonetheless, employees at the Department of Education reported receiving notices that even if they accepted the buy-out package, the Education Secretary reserved the right to cancel the offer, leaving thousands of workers without promised pay. On Wednesday, Trump and Musk also moved to eliminate GSA leases on over 7,500 federal government buildings across the country. On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the White House is preparing an executive order to fire thousands of employees from the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the FDA, CDC, and other public health agencies.

• Elon Musk’s DOGE staffers access the Treasury payment system and several Federal government agencies. With the sudden departure of Treasury chief David Lebryk on January 31, the federal payments system was being opened up to Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. By February 2, WIRED reported that six young software engineers in Musk’s employ had unprecedented access to the Treasury payments system, including the ability to access the personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans who depend on federal payments, and the ability to write new code into the system. DOGE staffers also went through data at several Federal agencies this week, including: reviewing Medicare/Medicaid databases for supposed ‘fraud’; running Department of Education data through an AI program to ‘identify wasteful spending’ (especially DEI or related programs); descended on the CDC headquarters in Atlanta as current staff rushed to save vital data from a purge of public health agencies’ websites; and accessed IT systems at NOAA, raising concerns about the continued integrity of the agency’s weather and climate data. By the time a federal judge ruled to bar Musk and staffers from altering the Treasury system on Thursday, an unprecedented amount of data had already been accessed. Also on Thursday, Marko Elez, one of the young software engineers with write access to the Treasury system, resigned from DOGE after he was linked to several social media posts with racist, neo-Nazi and eugenicist content.

• Federal employees report data purges and alterations. Social media posts from Bluesky and other platforms reveal reports from Federal employees of data being altered or disappearing altogether from Federal systems, including employee forms at OPM containing job titles, salaries and Social Security numbers, personnel records disappearing and reappearing, and the disappearance of a key CDC study on H5N1 bird flu. Others report that a mysterious program has been downloaded onto their government office computers allowing team chats to be searched for keywords. Employees raised suspicions that government documents are being run through AI data sifting programs.

• Shutdown of USAID and layoff of global workforce. On Monday, Trump and Elon Musk announced the shutdown of USAID. By Thursday, nearly all USAID staff worldwide had been laid off, leaving only 290 employees out of a staff of over 10,000. David Sirota reports that the agency had been investigating its oversight of public-private partnerships involving Musk companies.

• Update on federal funding freeze. Despite three orders from federal judges on January 28, January 31, and February 3 to block the funding freeze on federal grants and loans, federal grantees report still not being able to access billions of dollars in federal funding to continue current projects, including and especially projects related to environmental, infrastructure, and clean energy as well as several programs related to the Inflation Reduction Act. The Trump administration also moved to terminate studies at NOAA and the National Academy of Sciences on equity in fisheries and diversity in ocean sciences, and indicated that funding may be restricted to National Science Foundation grantees whose research contain any of a lengthy list of “forbidden” keywords relating to diversity, social justice, and historically marginalized people.

• Trump Administration’s assault on immigrants. On Tuesday, the first flight containing migrant deportees landed in Guantanamo Bay as Trump and new Secretary of State Marco Rubio explored deals with El Salvador as well as Guatemala to hold detained migrants of any nationality being deported from the United States. The Trump Administration also began its assault on sanctuary cities inside the United States, bringing a lawsuit against the state of Illinois, Cook County, and the City of Chicago for enforcing sanctuary laws and hampering the government’s immigration enforcement actions. On Wednesday, in one of her first actions as the new US Attorney General, Pam Bondi ordered the Justice Department to freeze federal funding for sanctuary cities, including hundreds of counties and major municipalities across the United States.

• Threats to the Department of Education. On Tuesday, reports surfaced that the White House is preparing an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education. The proposed executive order reportedly attempts to bar the DOE from “performing functions not clearly outlined in any statues,” and to call on Congress to abolish the department entirely. Short of that effort, the DOE released a statement on Thursday announcing additional appointees to implement Trump’s “America First” education agenda. The list includes figures like Julie Hartman, a radio host connected to right-wing radio and YouTube personality Dennis Prager.

• Trump removes FEC Chair. On Thursday night, Federal Election Commission Chair Ellen Weintraub posted on X that she was removed from her post by the Trump administration. On Friday she asserted that she would fight the removal and would stay in her position as long as possible. The Campaign Legal Center issued a statement Friday calling Weintraub’s removal illegal, as FEC commissioners cannot be removed unless the President and Senate have confirmed a replacement.

• Trump’s Gaza takeover plan. On Tuesday, in a joint press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump announced a plan for the US to “own” Gaza after the conclusion of Israel’s genocidal military campaign and open the Gaza Strip to real estate developers, turning it into a “Riviera of the Middle East.” The plan was met with global condemnation as well as consternation from Congressional Democrats and Republicans who had been supporting Israel’s actions in Palestine. On Thursday, it was reported that Trump had “walked back” parts of his plan, which only seem to relate to the involvement of US troops on the ground in Gaza. On Thursday, Trump also signed an executive order imposing sanctions and visa restrictions on the International Criminal Court, who had issued arrest warrants in November against Netanyahu and other Israeli officials for war crimes.

• Lies on the Panama Canal. Days after Panama announced its exit from China’s Belt and Road Initiative in a move lauded by Marco Rubio as a “step forward” to reaching a deal with the United States over the Panama Canal, relations between Panama and the US took a downturn after a surprise announcement from the State Department on Wednesday that Rubio had reached a deal with Panama to let US warships traverse the Canal for free. Panamanian President Jose Raul Mulino blasted the US State Department for peddling what he described as a “quite simply intolerable falsehood” regarding the purported deal.

• Assault on LGBTQIA+ and transgender people. Trump’s anti-trans and LGBTQIA+ agenda pushed forward this week, following up his day-one executive order recognizing only two genders and a first-week order banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth under 19 years old with executive orders banning transgender women from participating in women’s sports at the K-12 and college levels (implemented by the NCAA on Thursday), as well as directing the Department of Defense to change policies relating to transgender military service members leading to an outright ban. Transgender US citizens abroad have reported having their passports revoked and being banned from re-entering the United States. The State Department has begun implementing Trump’s executive orders by banning change of gender markers. Transgender people in the US now face prohibitive requirements for new passports, and run the risk of having their existing passports revoked entirely if they are or have been in the process of renewing their passport or updating their gender marker. Outside the executive orders, resources on gender-affirming healthcare, as well as vital HIV-related public health information, are being scrubbed from over 8,000 federal government websites, 3,000 of which were hosted at the Centers for Disease Control website; and over 2,200 data sets relating to gender-affirming healthcare, HIV, and contraception have disappeared from federal databases.

MOVEMENT TRACKER

• Anti-ICE mobilization, community trainings, and political education. A grassroots pushback against the Trump administration is happening in cities and towns across the country. Multiple grassroots organizations, as well as national immigrant rights organizations, have been engaged in building local community defense and rapid response networks that have thwarted ICE raids in places like Aurora, CO as well as in Chicago, where thousands of people have been attending know-your-rights and immigrant defense trainings. Chicago teachers are also actively engaged in training and disseminating information to workers and students. In addition to physical know-your-rights guides being distributed in communities, social media has also been essential in disseminating guides that help immigrant communities and activists in rapid response as well as directing community members to be precise in reporting ICE raids. Mass mobilizations are also erupting in cities such as Los Angeles, which saw thousands of protestors block the 101 freeway in Downtown LA on Sunday, February 2, as well as student walkouts across the country. On Monday, February 3, a national “Day without Immigrants” protest was called prompting undocumented workers and students to stay home from work or school, and many businesses across the country closed for the day in solidarity with their workers.

• The #50501 Movement mobilizes nationwide against Trump and Project 2025. On Wednesday, February 5, thousands of protestors rallied at state Capitols across the country in a nationwide protest called by the new 50501 Movement (#50501 stands for “50 states, 50 protests, 1 day”). According to PR Newswire, this campaign was launched by PR strategist Carlos Alvarez-Aranyos, a PR professional who has criticized the Harris campaign and mainstream Democrats for strategic communications failures. As evidenced by the campaign’s Reddit subthread, local mobilizations appear to be organized/supported by Indivisible and Political Revolution as well as grassroots organizers with experience in the 2016 and 2020 Bernie Sanders campaigns. The movement appears to be organizing on alternative platforms to Facebook and X, preferring Instagram, Reddit, Bluesky, Discord and Signal. After the nationwide protest, 50501 has announced it will be holding debriefing sessions in each state to get more people involved and determine next steps.

• Mobilizations for transgender and LGBTQIA+ rights. In the wake of Trump’s executive order banning gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth, protests have occurred at hospitals around the country, including at NYU Langione Hospital, UI Health in Chicago, and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. In response, New York Attorney General Letitia James issued a directive on Monday to state hospitals to continue gender-affirming care for trans youth in accordance with New York anti-discrimination law. On Thursday, January 30, trans rights activists rallied at nine state Capitols to protest Trump’s broad anti-trans agenda in mobilizations organized by the Transgender Unity Coalition. The Coalition has called for a mass mobilization in defense of transgender rights in Washington DC on March 1, 2025.

• Resistance actions more locally based than during the first Trump administration. In response to mainstream media narratives that resistance to Trump appears exhausted and more demobilized due to the lack of large marches such as the Women’s March in 2017, an article in the New Republic highlights the grassroots efforts of activists around the country who never stopped organizing between the two administrations, and suggests that the forms of resistance taking place now are less reliant on giant national mobilizations and are more locally based, defending targeted people and resisting the effects of the Trump Administration’s actions where they are felt.

• Federal employees mobilizing against Musk takeover of government systems. Federal employees in the crosshairs of Trump’s mass purge have also been mobilizing resistance actions in the form of protest rallies in DC and government offices, as well as leaking information on their experiences to the press and social media; and have adopted the ‘spoon’ text emoji as a symbolic rejoinder to Trump’s “Fork in the Road” buy-out proposal. As Musk’s DOGE team began to tamper with government computer systems, federal workers who found themselves locked out of offices at OPM, USAID, Department of Education and Department of Justice took to the streets for multiple days earlier this week to protest DOGE and call attention to the threats to government operations. On Tuesday afternoon, employees at the Treasury were joined by Democratic members of Congress who had found themselves barred from the Treasury building in a rally drawing over 1,000 people. The social media account ‘Alt National Park Service’, established a few years ago by a small group of park rangers, appears to have become a vital outlet for federal employees, aggregating reports of data tampering and other crises happening at multiple government agencies; and claims that a coalition of over 100,000 federal employees has organized to resist Trump and Musk from the inside.

• State and local government pushback to Trump’s agenda. State and local leaders have been resisting Trump’s federal directives in multiple ways, reaffirming jurisdictional laws relating to sanctuary policies, gender-affirming care, social equity and non-discrimination. Last week, CA Attorney General Rob Bonta reaffirmed California’s sanctuary laws in the face of Trump’s executive order and provided guidance to local authorities on non-compliance with ICE. In Humboldt County, CA, the county government issued a statement reaffirming its sanctuary laws and directives for non-cooperation with ICE, echoing similar affirmations from other cities across the country including Ithaca, NY, Amherst, MA, Philadelphia, San Francisco and more. Attorneys General in Washington, Oregon, Arizona and Illinois also filed suit against Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship. On Wednesday, 15 state Attorneys General issued a statement on protecting access to gender-affirming care in their states. On Thursday, NY Attorney General Letitia James and 12 other state Attorneys General filed suit against DOGE and the Trump Administration, asserting that the unprecedented level of access given to DOGE and Musk employees is “unlawful, unprecedented, and unacceptable.”  And on Friday, MA Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell and 22 other state Attorneys General filed a temporary injunction motion in their lawsuit against Trump’s federal funding freeze.

• Lawsuits against Trump Administration policies. Hundreds of lawsuits against the Trump administration’s actions have been filed in the past three weeks by individuals, civil society groups, and nonprofits in conjunction with state and local government leaders. An exhaustive list of federal lawsuits filed against Trump’s executive orders has been compiled by CourtWatch, and among the highlights include: 

• A lawsuit filed by AARP, AFL-CIO, and UFCW against the Treasury Department for allowing Elon Musk access to the private information of millions of Americans;

• A suit brought by a coalition of nonprofits, led by the National Council of Nonprofits and Democracy Forward, against Trump’s federal funding freeze;

• A suit filed by ACLU, Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, and Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project against Trump’s asylum ban which has left hundreds of refugees in limbo;

• A suit filed by the American Association of University Professors, National Association of Higher Ed Diversity Officers, and the local government of Baltimore, MD against Trump’s DEI purge in higher education;

• A suit brought by the Gender Justice League and four transgender individuals contesting Trump’s executive order and impending ban on transgender people serving in the military