Musk is just helping Trump implement the anti-worker ideas of the radical Project 2025
In 2024, candidate Donald Trump ran for president as someone who cared about the average worker in America. But during his first month in office, he has fallen head over heels for the billionaire class and forgotten the people who elected him. Right from the start, President Trump handed our government over to the richest man on the planet, Elon Musk, and gave him access to all our most sensitive, personal data so that Musk can use that exclusive access to make himself even richer.
Even worse, Trump and Musk have launched a dizzying series of assaults on low- and middle-income workers, making clear that this billionaire takeover of our government will leave American workers even more powerless than they were before.
And it’s not just Musk – Trump has surrounded himself with a band of billionaires who could not be more out of touch with the everyday experience of most Americans. The federal minimum wage has been the same since 2009: $7.25. Sixty-two percent of Americans support raising the minimum wage to $15 because they agree if you work a full-time job, you shouldn’t be living at or below the poverty level.
'ONLY TAKES 3': DEMS PUSH PERSONAL DATA PROTECTION TO TURN GOP AGAINST ELON MUSK'S DOGE
You know who doesn’t agree? Trump and his billionaire cabinet. His newly confirmed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent – net worth $521 million – made it clear during his confirmation hearing that he believes workers don’t deserve a raise in the embarrassingly low national wage floor.
President Donald Trump ran a campaign to help American workers. Has he lived up to that? FILE: Trump speaks to the crowd at the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on Thursday, July 18, 2024. (Paul Steinhauser/Fox News Digital)
It only took one week for Trump to set his sights on destroying labor unions, where many workers join together to bargain for higher wages and better working conditions. Trump’s first target was the agency responsible for protecting workers’ rights, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
The NLRB conducts union elections, investigates allegations of unfair labor practices, and protects workers from being exploited by their employers, all of which enrages billionaires like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Musk. The NLRB can’t operate with less than three of its five members. So, what did Trump do? He paralyzed it by firing NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox, who had another three years left in her term. With just two members left, the board has been rendered completely toothless and unable to order parties to pay remedies or recognize a union.
But it’s certainly not surprising, with Musk in charge. Musk has always hated workers. He made that point very clear, outright declaring "I disagree with the idea of unions," and he’s successfully fought tooth and nail to block Tesla workers from ever forming one.
Tesla is the only major U.S. car manufacturer whose workers aren’t represented by a union, and they are worse off because of it. Tesla employees make about 30% less than workers at GM and Ford, who are unionized through the UAW. And before Trump killed the NLRB, Musk’s companies were the subject of 24 investigations for alleged labor violations. Now he has free rein to mistreat his workers.
We know what comes next because Trump has spent the first month in office executing a radical plan to hand government over to the billionaires. It’s called Project 2025, and this anti-worker, pro-corporate plan previews what’s ahead.
Project 2025 outlined an end to all project labor agreement requirements, which protect good-paying union jobs, and a repeal of Davis-Bacon, which assures that construction jobs using taxpayer dollars pay a living wage to construction workers.
Even worse, Project 2025 calls for limiting when workers receive overtime pay to only when they work more than 80 hours in two weeks. If you work 60 hours one week and 20 the next week, you won’t get the overtime pay you earned in the first week.
Trump and Musk have also spent their first weeks in office relentlessly demonizing federal workers. These are the people who inspect our food to make sure it’s safe, provide medical care to veterans, administer Social Security payments and process passports. Four out of five federal workers live and work outside the D.C. area. Before he was confirmed, Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russ Vought said, "We want to put [federal workers] in trauma."
House Democrats were blocked from entering the Department of Education building in Washington, Feb. 7, 2025. (Fox News)
The greatest insult to workers will be the giant tax and spending bill that Trump and congressional Republicans are pushing through Congress. It cuts taxes for billionaires, millionaires and corporations, and to pay for those tax giveaways, Republicans are going to gut the programs that help minimum-wage workers and their families, like Medicaid.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS OPINION
Medicaid pays for most nursing home beds in the country, where the parents of hard-working Americans spend their final days. Those nursing home beds will disappear, and working families will face bankruptcy, having to shoulder all the cost of expensive acute care for their loved one.
All of these attacks on workers happening at the same time, aren’t a big coincidence. Trump has decided to empower the ruling class – the billionaires, the big corporate CEOs, the financial firm titans – and gut protections and services for everyone else.
We know what comes next because Trump has spent the first month in office executing a radical plan to hand government over to the billionaires. It’s called Project 2025, and this anti-worker, pro-corporate plan previews what’s ahead.
Musk doesn’t care about helping working people because his priority is using his newly purchased power to make money off his control of government. He used his role at the White House to get a meeting with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi so he could talk about opening a Tesla factory in India and shipping jobs overseas.
He shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau so he can turn X into an unregulated payments app. He destroyed USAID to give China, where he manufactures half of his cars, more power on the world’s stage. Unsurprisingly, Musk's personal net worth has increased $130 billion since the election.
Trump might have run as someone who cared about regular people, but he’s governing like someone obsessed with one, singular idea: steal from workers in order to enrich the very, very wealthy and the corporate class. Every day Americans see more proof of Trump’s blind loyalty to members of his own billionaire clique and his abandonment of the working-class voters who supported him last November. The evidence is stacking up and increasingly impossible to ignore.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM SEN. CHRIS MURPHY
Democrat Chris Murphy represents Connecticut in the U.S. Senate.
