The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, more commonly known as WIC, provides food assistance to 6.8 million low-income pregnant women, new mothers, and children under the age of five. It’s going to run out of funding by the end of next week. All civil rights investigations within the Department of Education have been officially put on pause. Meanwhile 750,000 federal workers are going without pay. For workers making $825 a week, the average take-home pay of an AFGE member, missing a paycheck will be the difference between making rent or not, full meals or partial meals, medication or no medication.
It’s exactly what Trump wants. He has declared this government shutdown to be an “unprecedented opportunity” to lay off more federal workers and has already used it to cut $26 billion in funding for climate initiatives and public transportation, mostly in Democrat-led cities and states such as New York City. Russel Vought, Trump’s arch right-wing budget chief and key architect of Project 2025, put it plain and simple: workers in agencies and programs that are “not consistent with the President’s priorities” are on the chopping block, and layoffs could start any day.
Trump is using this crisis as one more step in the regime’s authoritarian power grab. The full power of the labor movement must be mobilized to restore funding for healthcare and stop the shutdown.
Fund Healthcare, Not ICE
Needless to say, it is not funding for ICE’s mass deportations that have been put on pause during the shutdown, nor funding for the dystopically but appropriately renamed Department of War, and certainly not aid to Israel for their continued genocide in Gaza.
The shutdown occurred because the Democrats rightly refused to vote for a spending package that did not include restoring the Medicaid cuts in the Big Billionaire Bill and healthcare tax credits. This is a welcome change from March when Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking congressional Democrat, at the last minute got ten Democratic senators to vote for Trump’s spending bill at the time. That bill cut nearly $1 billion from Veterans Affairs, over $1 billion from climate disaster infrastructure, all while jacking up military spending by $6 billion. After this, the Democrats’ favorability rating sank to a historic low of 27% and it’s barely recovered since.
Desperate to look like fighters, the Democrats are finally putting up a semblance of a stand. They absolutely should not cave, but they can’t win and won’t win this fight for us. A new poll indicates that 64% of voters think the country’s political system is incapable of solving the country’s problems, and they’re not wrong. Restoring healthcare tax credits, restoring and increasing Medicaid funding, stopping the mass deportations, Trump’s attacks on trans people—defeating Trump’s agenda in general—will not be won by the Democratic Party. This can only be accomplished through mass, organized, working-class action.
Lessons from the Last Shutdown
The last government shutdown, which was also the longest in history at 35 days, was over the $5.7 billion that Trump wanted for his infamous border wall. Two weeks in, as the first $0 payday approached, hundreds of TSA agents and air traffic controllers began calling out sick at major airports across the country. Paul Rinaldi, then-president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association declared, “Controllers are stressed; they’re worried; they’re tired; they’re distracted. And they’re not going to come to work if they’re not fit for duty.”
Solidarity in the industry was palpable. Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, called on all her members to go to the offices of their congresspeople and stay until the shutdown was resolved: “Showing up to work for what? If air traffic controllers can’t do their jobs, we can’t do ours.” Within mere hours of Nelson’s call for essentially a mass political strike in the airline industry, Trump backed down, saying he would reopen the government without funding for the wall. The Democrats tried to claim credit for the victory, but the real heroes were clear—the thousands of workers who took matters into their own hands and the union leaders who backed them.
To be sure, the situation today is not the same as December 2018 and January 2019. That shutdown came smack dab in the middle of the massive teachers strike wave that swept the nation throughout 2018 and 2019. The US labor movement was on the offensive. Today an emboldened Trump’s vicious attacks combined with union leaders’ shameful refusal to mount a meaningful fightback has the labor movement on the backfoot, desperately needing to step forward.
Trump 2.0 is also a far more formidable opponent than Trump 1.0. Many federal workers are furloughed, but those deemed essential and still working—including TSA agents and air traffic controllers who were crucial to ending the 2019 shutdown—may understandably be scared to take action, fearing politically motivated layoffs by Trump, who may very well threaten to fire any worker who participates in sickouts or other actions. This means the fightback needs to be even bigger and more powerful than in 2019, and the solidarity displayed then needs to be even greater now. Private sector workers and public sector workers outside the federal government will also have an important role to play.
We Need Action
A first step could be the federal worker unions, with other unions actively supporting, organizing mass meetings of workers in all affected workplaces to discuss how to fight back and begin to organize for mass action. Mass demonstrations could be called outside of airports and federal buildings, under the slogan “Fund healthcare, not ICE—End the shutdown!” Unfortunately, the union leaders have not shown a capacity for this kind of fighting approach, so rank-and-file workers will need to get organized and fight for their unions to take bolder initiative.
Demonstrations alone will not end the shutdown, but could be used to mobilize the broader anger at Trump in US society, while building toward larger scale demonstrations and united workplace action, including strikes against the shutdown and Trump’s agenda as a whole. The Sumud flotilla and the general strike in Italy against the genocide in Gaza, while on the other side of the world, show the way forward: mass direct action and working-class methods of struggle.
This shutdown is not likely to be short. Both the Democrats and Republicans will be working overtime to pin the blame on the other and win the narrative war in the media. But while Trump is the clear aggressor now, the truth is that both parties have failed working people time and time again and can’t be relied on. Trump wants a fight. He wants a showdown, and all those opposed to his far-right, anti-worker authoritarian regime need to give him one. The labor movement has the power to do so—we just need to use it.
We demand:
- Fund healthcare, not ICE and genocide! End the shutdown!
- No unpaid work! Immediate backpay and reinstatement of wages for all federal workers.
- Abolish ICE and slash the $1 trillion military budget! Secure emergency funding for WIC, SNAP, and all social services that keep working-class families afloat under this brutal capitalist system.
- The labor movement must lead—we need mass demonstrations outside airports and federal buildings, building up toward mass workplace action to mobilize the full power of the working class to stop Trump!
