A group of about 30 members and allies of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) rallied at the State Capitol on Friday to oppose Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which the organization said “degrades” civil servants.

Sen. Ghazala Hashmi (D-Chesterfield) told the crowd that while workers have faced challenges throughout history, recent actions— including abrupt firings, agency closures, and the suspension of federal aid programs— mark a “critical moment” for labor rights.

“These are not just attacks on unions, they are attacks on Virginians, on our families, and on the values that we hold dear. But we are stronger than those that seek to harm us. We're stronger than those that seek to roll back progress,” Hashmi said. “The actions that have been undertaken by the Trump-Musk administration require a collective response. And our unions are best positioned to bring together that collective response.”

Kristen Reed, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and co-founder of the United Campus Workers of Virginia chapter, said college professors and civil servants have been unfairly labeled as elitist.

“We've been told a lot of stories about who the enemy is …The people telling these stories are people who have hoarded more money and more resources and more power than any one person should ever have in a just society,” Reed said. 

On the first day of his second administration, Donald Trump issued an executive order to pause all hiring for jobs at the federal level. The administration also directed federal agencies to lay off all probationary employees. 

The impacts of this hiring freeze have been immediate for the Department of Veteran Affairs, which is currently struggling to staff a health care center that opened in February, according to Mintina Minto, president of the AFGE local 2145 and VA employee. 

“Our director has this mandate now to make sure that this HCC (health care center) is up and running. But guess what? He does not have the manpower,” Minto said.

In February, Federal employees received an email from the Office of Management and Budget with a subject line that read “What did you do last week?” The email instructed employees to respond with five things that they had accomplished over the previous week. Elon Musk later posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, that failure to respond would be taken as a resignation, something that was not included in the original email.

DOGE officials and department leaders scanned these emails for repeated responses and used this information to decide whether to terminate employees, according to Samantha Reed, a union president and employee at Fort Gregg-Adams. 

“So instead of taking the approach that is more structured, that we're all accustomed to – because there are processes in place to address if there needs to be some of reduction of the force – but to just arbitrarily demote and remove people is just so unconscionable,” Reed said. 

Monique Samuels, president of AFGE Local 1992 and a “day-one” union member, said that in her 43 years as a civil servant, she has never seen mass layoffs on this scale, as formal processes such as the Reduction in Force exist to handle budget cuts or reorganization.

“Everything they're doing is a lie and it's illegal. Everything. No government employee gets fired by somebody coming up and saying, ‘You're fired.’ That is not the process. That let me know that these are people who know absolutely nothing about the civil service,” Samuels said.