Former Acting Secretary of Labor Calls On Students to 'Fight For Federal Government Employees' at HLS Talk

Julie Su, the former U.S. Secretary of Labor under President Joe Biden, condemned President Donald Trump’s attempts to slash the federal civil service. She challenged attendees of Tuesday’s Harvard Law School discussion to stand up against the Trump administration’s efforts.

“You need to fight for federal government employees — not just because it’s the right thing to do for them, but because it really is about working people’s rights and the power of unions,” Su said.

Trump has fired over a hundred thousand federal civil servants since taking office earlier this year. Su blasted the move as an attempt to “undercut” the federal government and push towards “small government and privatization.”

“They’re destroying the Federal Aviation Administration, leading to planes crashing and people saying, ‘Gosh, maybe the FAA is not competent to do this,’” Su said.

“These are people who want federal contacts and want federal money for themselves,” she added.

Sharon Block, a Harvard Law School professor who joined Su on the panel, criticized Trump’s executive order ending over a dozen federal departments’ collective bargaining with unions.

“It’s just a basic part of having dignity and agency at work, to be able to engage in concerted activity,” Block said. “The fact that those rights were recently taken away from close to a million civil servants should be an outrage.”

In an interview after the event, Su condemned the Trump administration’s “full-on assault on civil servants, on the role of government, and on the power of unions.”

“We’re in a moment where everybody has to ask: ‘What are we doing to protect the rights that were hard run, the systems that are needed to make our country function, and the democracy that we live under?’” Su said.

Block was critical of the lack of transparency in the Trump administration. She pointed to a lack of information about the Department of Governmental Efficiency’s processes and factual mistakes on the department’s website that the department has since taken down.

“There is no transparency about how this process is unfolding,” Block said.

Tuesday’s event was the third discussion at the Law and Democracy Forum, a series organized by law school students in the wake of Trump’s return to office.

Izak Epstein, one of the event’s organizers, said a coalition of students designed the forum “as a reaction to seismic changes happening in government and in law” since the start of the year.

“We felt that students were grappling with what’s happening around us, but didn’t quite have a forum to be able to discuss these things with people who have either lived it themselves or are experts in it,” Epstein said.
Su called on every day citizens and those in attendance to advocate for public servants as they face cuts and uncertainty.

“I think it’s the job of all the rest of us who are not in the federal civil service to stand with them, to put our bodies against that machine,” she added.

—Staff writer Wyeth Renwick can be reached at wyeth.renwick@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @wzrenwick.

—Staff writer Nirja J. Trivedi can be reached at nirja.trivedi@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @nirjatriv.