[T]he new common sense: AI is the future, so we must rapidly deploy it across the government to maintain U.S. geopolitical dominance.
In recent years, other federal unionists and I at the Army Corps of Engineers have successfully campaigned to ensure congressional oversight of any automation of lock operations on our nation’s inland waterways.
We did this through our union locals and our national Army Corps of Engineers Council by highlighting the safety risks facing the workforce and the public, along with potential national security liabilities, stemming from automation of critical public infrastructure. These successes can be a model of the solidarity necessary to oppose powerful industry lobbyists and the politicians who take up their causes.
With the prospect of wide government application of more novel automation schemes, we beg the public to heed our warning: the implementation of privately developed artificial intelligence within government represents a modern-day digital Trojan horse. The effect of deploying such technology is to replace the thinking and quality control checks traditionally performed by oath-sworn, human workers with the pre-programmed, axiomatic assumptions of Silicon Valley, sworn to uphold nothing but shareholder returns.
The work we have done at the Army Corps of Engineers Council to oppose automation closer to home can perhaps be a guide. Now more than ever, federal employees face limitations compared with private-sector union members in how we can assert our collective voice. We need to be creative, and we need to win the support of the public we serve. As current and former government employees, we have expertise and experience to lend to the movement for democracy in the face of the new oligarchy, but we are only a small part of the coalition needed to disrupt the current order.
The attacks of the second Trump administration on the federal workforce have infused our demands with new urgency. In the immediate aftermath of the first DOGE layoffs, those of us who have been doing this work began coordinating government-wide through the Federal Unionists Network.
Along with the communities we serve, many thousands of current and former federal workers stand opposed to the practice of dismantling our government and handing its operation over to the administration’s corporate friends. We understand the stakes and are building the solidarity necessary to turn back this tide, building a movement in person and on the ground that even MechaHitler cannot stop.
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