During a town hall event on Monday, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) spoke about the Trump Administration’s firings of federal employees across various government agencies.
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00:05Here.
00:07Purple.
00:08Oh.
00:10Oh.
00:11Sorry.
00:13Go for it.
00:14Hi, my name is Jamie Sloan.
00:16I've met you several times.
00:18Hello, good to see you again.
00:21I'm wondering about, since we are facing this,
00:25this turn where your hands run essentially
00:28by the lack of majority power.
00:31How are you advocating for dual power
00:34in the case of community workers, the groups?
00:39I'm a member of the DSA.
00:41I also work at a not-profit that I really value
00:44as an organization that is really strong
00:47and you can think of young as you know what's up.
00:50So like, yeah.
00:52How do you advocate for community members
00:55or your constituents also interact with other community groups?
01:00I just wanted to make the point that public television
01:08had reported that 132,000 people in the federal government
01:13have been fired or pressured to take fire.
01:16And this raises the question of, in all this discussion
01:20of what's happening in the country
01:22and what the Trump hikes are doing to the country,
01:26where is common sense?
01:28Can the rally drive the common sense?
01:31Can anybody look at this and say,
01:35hey, this is good, this is normal?
01:39This is going to help us?
01:41Firing 132,000 people?
01:43And it goes on and on?
01:45Common sense, please.
01:46Let's rally around common sense.
01:48Unfortunately, there isn't much common sense to be found
01:58when it comes to the executive branch.
02:01You know, the whole plan with the federal firing
02:07or putting them on administrative leave
02:11is essentially to dismantle the departments.
02:15He understands, right, as we've reminded him time and time again,
02:19he does not have a constitutional right
02:22to dismantle any of the departments that were stood up by Congress.
02:31So I will try to get to as many of you.
02:34So the plan, then, is to go after the law-hanging fruit,
02:41which is a lot of the staff keep talking about people who are on probation.
02:46Many of these people who are on probation are not new employees.
02:51They are not new employees that were just hired.
02:55Most of them are employees who got a promotion
03:00because they excel in their job.
03:02So they are new to the role.
03:06And so not only is he gutting the functionality of these departments
03:13that carry out important work for the American people,
03:16they are firing the best of the best in many of these departments.
03:21So what he ultimately wants to do is that when the courts say,
03:28what you are doing is unconstitutional,
03:30to say the Department of Education still exists,
03:36even though it cannot carry out the letter of the law in its duties.
03:43He will say, you know, the VA is still there,
03:48even though they are planning to fire 77,000 staff at the VA.
03:54So that's the plan and that's the thing that we have to push back against.
03:59And I am so grateful for a lot of our AGs,
04:02a lot of the organizations that are bringing the lawsuits.
04:06If you get an opportunity, please thank them.
04:10We are working tirelessly every single day.
04:13There are trackers out there so you can see where these cases are.
04:17To your question about collaboration,
04:19we do inside-outside organizing all the time.
04:22That's essentially the existence of the Black Caucus.
04:26And that is essentially the existence of the Black Caucus.
04:29We oftentimes do weekly briefings with outside groups that work with us.
04:35on both of those caucuses.
04:37I know that the Hispanic Caucus and other caucuses also do that.
04:40Because none of us will have the information
04:43and we'll be able to disseminate the information
04:45without the outside groups working hand-in-hand with us.
04:50And actually before the election, for a whole year,
04:53we had a Project 2025 Task Force
04:56that was looking at what this possibly could look like
05:00and how we would respond.
05:02And that's why you saw those lawsuits be brought up instantly.
05:06It's because we've been planning for the possibility of this happening.