Federally-Employed Marjorie Taylor Greene Under Fire for Saying Federal Workers ‘Do Not Deserve Their Paychecks’ While Job Cuts Disproportionately Gut Black Middle Class

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said Tuesday that federal workers “don’t deserve” their paychecks during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing.

“Those are not real jobs producing federal revenue, by the way. They’re consuming taxpayer dollars. Those jobs are paid for by the American tax people, who work real jobs, earn real income, pay federal taxes and then pay these federal employees,” said Greene, perhaps unaware that her job does not produce any federal revenue and is paid for by the taxpayers.

“Federal employees do not deserve their jobs,” she said. “Federal employees do not deserve their paychecks. And these are jobs that can be fired at will.”

Greene was responding to comments from Democratic Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, who urged the federal government not to privatize the U.S. Postal Service. 

“These reports are beyond troubling, and I respectfully request that you have a hearing again on the USPS,” Krishnamoorthi told the committee. “No private-sector entity provides universal service across the nation, and without these letter carriers and others, more than 51.5 million households and businesses, especially in rural communities, would have no guaranteed delivery.”

Rep. Veronica Escobar, a Texas Democrat, criticized Greene for advocating for casting aside the careers of her own constituents, noting the number of federal workers in Greene’s district. 

“Marjorie Taylor Greene believes 6,008 of her constituents are unworthy of a job or a paycheck because they work for the federal government,” Escobar wrote Tuesday in a post on the social platform X. “To quote her favorite person: SAD!”

The federal government, which employs about 3 million Americans, is the largest employer in the country. So far, at least 75,000 of them accepted buyout offers and thousands more were fired in the past several weeks. Many of the workers fired were either newer hires or told they didn’t meet performance expectations.  

Rep. Shantel Brown said federal workers “don’t serve a president or his billionaire buddies. They serve the American people.”

President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are waging an all-out assault on federal workers,” Brown said. “This isn’t just an attack on federal employees. It’s an attack on all of us. They are doctors and nurses taking care of veterans. They are TSA agents and air traffic controllers who keep us safe when we fly.

“This is about dismantling the very services that millions of Americans depend on,” the Ohio Democrat added.

Eliminating the Postal Service, Krishnamoorthi noted, could throw “trillions of dollars of e-commerce transactions into turmoil.”

Greene, an advocate of the chaos favored by President Trump, has been a fierce defender of DOGE’s cuts.

Black workers, meanwhile, will be hit disproportionately hard by the cuts.

“The federal workforce was a means to help build the Black middle class. It hired Black Americans at a higher rate than private employers,” said Sheria Smith, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents the Education Department employees. 

As a part of his efforts, President Trump has targeted the Department of Education, saying he’d like to see the agency shut down. Nearly 30 percent of Education Department employees are Black, according to a 2024 report.

Smith said 60 of the 74 workers that had been let go so far at the DOE are Black.

NBC News reports that at the Department of Health and Human Services, where more than 1,300 new hires were reportedly laid off, 20 percent of the staff was Black. And at the Department of Veterans Affairs, which recently lost 1,000 employees, 24 percent are Black.

Marcus Casey, a fellow in the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution, said the administration’s efforts are trying to undermine the gains of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination on the basis of race and other characteristics and of affirmative action, which sought make hiring and promoting process more inclusive. 

“Whether it was from the post office, through direct growth of federal agencies, through the military — the government fought against the headwinds associated with the private sector,” Casey, an affiliated scholar with Brookings’ Future of Middle Class Initiative, told NBC.