The Federal Unionists Network is the first large-scale network for government workers, and they’re building solidarity across departments and the labor movement.
Chris Dols, founding member of FUN, addresses the crowd during the May Day rally at Foley Square in New York City on May 1, 2025. (Phoebe Grandi)
New York City—On May 1, at 5 pm, around 30 federal workers gathered in a corner of Foley Square in Manhattan. Jammed between bright blue Hotel & Gaming Trades Council signs and Federal Plaza, members of the Federal Unionists Network (FUN) passed out signs with Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and National Treasury Employees Union logos, imagery, and related slogans on them. Passersby stopped to laugh at signs featuring a photo of Russell Vought, the director of the US Office of Management and Budget who halted most of CFPB’s operations earlier this year, with devil horns.
Over the next half hour, thousands more protesters flowed into the Lower Manhattan plaza. In all, more than 15,000 people waited in anticipation for the May Day protest to commence. It wasn’t FUN’s first rally in New York City—the network has been organizing weekly demonstrations a block away—but it was their first May Day rally.
FUN is organizing federal workers and building solidarity with other labor groups in order to save their jobs and the work they do for the public. It’s a fight that FUN founding member Chris Dols, a local member of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) who works in the US Army Corp of Engineering, said was in the spirit of May Day. “We have an opportunity to remind the rest of the working class that we have May Day. It represents the best of American labor, its history, and its capacity, not just for fighting, but also for winning,” Dols said. “As federal workers, [we’re] standing up and catalyzing a new labor movement alongside the defense of the public sphere that [the Trump administration is] after. And it’s not every lifetime you’re able to do that.”
The first iteration of FUN started in 2019, as a small and informal circle of federal workers, and it soon morphed into a Whatsapp group organizing opposition to the 2019 government shutdown, It was called the Federal Workers Coalition and consisted largely of IFPTE, American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), and National Labor Relations Board members. The Federal Workers Coalition didn’t really live past the shutdown, but workers revived it during the Biden presidency, after Dols said he realized in 2022, “If we’re not ready to fight for our rights with a relatively friendly administration, what’s it gonna be like the next time a Republican is in office?” He and others from the Federal Workers Coalition started organizing as FUN, with actions like circulating an open letter pressuring Senator Chuck Schumer to confirm Joe Biden’s nominees to lead the Federal Labor Relations Authority.
Much of that time was spent preparing for what would become the next Trump presidency. “FUN was very much organized with the intent of having the forces in place capable of waging a real fight back,” the next time a labor-hostile president came to power.
FUN is the first large-scale network for federal workers, who do not have a strong history of solidarity. As Dols noted, “The federal union movement does not have a tradition of working together,” but given the attacks the workers are facing, there is no reason for “being sectoral anymore.”
This year’s May Day also happened to mark the 100th day of the second Trump administration, which through a combination of layoffs, buyouts, and firings, has caused 275,240 federal workers to leave their jobs. Trump also signed an executive order in March taking away many federal workers’ right to organize. This irony was not lost on the activists and politicians whose speeches commenced the protest.
The speakers, which included Dols and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, harped on the importance of unity in the face of the Trump administration. “My LinkedIn network is not going to save us,” Dr. Roona Ray, a member of the Physicians for National Health Program, said to the cheering crowd. “The networks we actually need are in real life like this massive gathering.”
After the speeches ended, the unions began to funnel up Broadway toward Battery Park. “Russell Vought told us that he wants us to be traumatized, and to be honest, there’s a lot of federal workers who are traumatized,” Mike, an AFGE member and EPA speechwriter, told us. “They’re very scared to show their face at functions that FUN is putting on. But it’s getting to go to these things; it’s a nice indication that there is this broader movement.”
While Mike was partially talking about the group’s participation in the May Day protest, he was also referring to the weekly rallies outside Manhattan’s federal buildings. “It can be anything from 30 to 40 people to 200 people,” said AFGE member and EPA attorney Suzy. “We just want to make sure that we are ever present, that we’re continuing to work this muscle.”
Both Suzy and Mike heard of FUN through involvement with their local union and seeing the weekly pickets that happen outside of their office building. They are some of the many EPA workers who have found themselves becoming increasingly involved in FUN. “My job feels like my dream job, and that’s something I’ve noticed a lot at the agency. People won’t really wind up here by accident,” said Mike. “Each regulation that the EPA has is kind of written in the blood of people who have suffered at the hands of unregulated industry.”
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Concerns over rollbacks in regulations are driving EPA workers to join union efforts like FUN. “My job feels very safe a lot of the time, because who doesn’t want hazardous waste to be regulated properly, right?” said Suzy. “But when we’re regulating industry and the administrator has shown himself to be very pro-industry, you can’t help but think, is my job going to be impacted?”
After Trump’s election and the unleashing of DOGE, FUN’s membership exploded. And when Trump announced that he was ending collective bargaining via an executive order in March, the group ramped up its actions. FUN has 1,000 active members nationally alongside 16,000 people who have reached out to help with organizing, and is looking to grow, said Drew Curtis, another FUN leader who is a member of AFGE Local 3911 and works for the EPA’s environmental justice office.
Curtis was a longtime community organizer before he began working for the EPA. “There are many different versions of what you see here, local networks of federal workers,” Curtis said. He listed examples of metropolitan areas across the country that have FUN chapters: “Boston, Baltimore, upstate New York, around the capital district, Boise area. We’re looking to develop it in more places too, rural communities in the South.” Dols added that a FUN group in Boone, North Carolina had an event with a 1,500 person turnout. “We were with one of the federal workers who works in one of the parks over there [in North Carolina] last weekend, and he was telling us, that is the biggest thing they’ve ever had.”
In a rousing speech to FUN members at a meeting prior to the march, Dols pointed out that the first union to fight for a 10-hour work day was a federal union, and now, federal workers are the first unions under attack by the Trump administration. That’s one of FUN’s main messages: Federal workers are first, but what hurts them will harm everyday people next.
“However much they rhetorically attack federal workers as lazy bureaucrats, the deep state, all that stuff like, that’s just political justification,” said Dols about the right-wing’s attempt to gut the labor movement. “But the real thing is, they want to privatize the large sections of the federal service. They want to take Social Security. They want to take these huge areas of services that they can privatize.”
Being involved with FUN is a morale booster—it’s, well, fun, said Curtis. “If I wasn’t doing this, I would just be feeling depressed and kind of want to give up… It’s the fact that we’re coming together to fight as federal workers, but also with our allies too.”
Suzy said she shared his feelings: “In a moment where we’re being made to feel isolated and unwanted by the public and all of these different things, it has provided us an outlet to get plugged into.”
She said she hoped that other unions were hearing the group’s message: “We’re trying to ring the alarm for our private union partners all the time.… Federal workers are the most vulnerable, because they have the most control over us. And we kind of feel like a canary in a coal mine.”
On May Day, as the group drew closer to Battery Park, a member of the group shouted into a megaphone: “Federal workers, we’re veering off here!”
Inside a financial district office building, FUN members attended a May Day after-party sponsored by the United Teachers Federation (UFT). The event, hosted in honor of federal workers, brought together UFT and FUN members alongside other May Day participants to hear speeches and stories from federal workers. “That’s the kind of solidarity [we need],” Dols said. “It’s just the beginning, I hope, of a relationship with them and with other unions.”
Elsie Carson-HoltElsie Carson-Holt is a journalist based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in The Boston Globe, FAIR, and LGBTQ Nation, among other places.
Phoebe GrandiPhoebe Grandi is a journalist currently based in Brooklyn. She is also the publishing intern at The Nation.