WASHINGTON—Paul Osadebe still holds his job as a lawyer at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Still, with so many of his coworkers having lost their jobs, he says it is endangering the mission of providing housing and revitalizing communities.
“They’ve tried to force so many people out that we might not be able to make sure that housing is safe. The process for people applying to housing and actually getting it so they can have a roof over their head, it takes people to make that happen, and we’re under such assault that it's very hard for us to do our jobs,” said Osadebe, who was speaking as an organizer for the Federal Unionist Network, a union.
Osadebe spoke at the Emancipation Day Speak Out on Wednesday evening to commemorate the day when slaves were freed in Washington. D.C. and voice concerns about the Trump administration’s mass firings and budget cuts in Washington at the Metropolitan AME Church in downtown Washington, D.C.
The Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, has shrunk the 2.4 million federal workforce by what is estimated to have been hundreds of thousands of people by firing, laying off, and pushing federal employees into buyouts to “maximize governmental efficiency and productivity,” according to the White House. No official tally of the federal workforce cuts exists.
“We were told to go into [federal jobs] for security that now is subject to the whims of a billionaire who has no attachment to their realities,” said Ty-Hobson Powell, 29, a local activist.
Sam Epps, President of the Metropolitan Washington Council at the AFL-CIO, a federation of labor unions in the United States, emphasized the importance of federal workers’ job security and access to healthcare.
“This is about working people, organized or unorganized,” Epps said. “This is a huge transfer of power where you [federal workers] are.”
In addition to cutting many federal jobs in the first three months of his presidency, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order, “Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful,” in March.
“Washington, D.C., is the only city that belongs to all Americans and that all Americans can claim as theirs. As the capital city of the greatest Nation in the history of the world, it should showcase beautiful, clean, and safe public spaces,” Trump said in the executive order.
The executive order sets up a D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force to work closely with local officials, create joint priorities and work together to keep D.C. safe. But city officials and activists see the administration’s actions as an overstep.
“You can’t make D.C. safe and beautiful by cutting over a billion dollars from its budget,” Osadebe said.
Congress adopted a bill that would freeze funding at 2024 levels, resulting in a billion-dollar budget cut. The DC government also expected funding shortfalls because of all the federal workers who have lost jobs and will not pay the same level of taxes.
Osadebe said he sees the Trump administration’s cuts to the federal government and exertion of authority over D.C. as a testing ground for the whole country and urges workers to fight back.
“The way forward is to get organized,” Osadebe said. “If it’s you versus the administration, that’s not going to work but, if everyone who is feeling demoralized and scared or just kind of beaten down find other like minded people and take concrete steps towards defending the thing that they care about, we'll see a big enough coalition to stop all this in its tracks.”
Erin Drumm is a reporter for the Medill News Service covering politics. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2024 with a BA in American Studies and is now a graduate student at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism specializing in politics, policy and foreign affairs.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.