Democrats invite fired US federal workers to attend Trump’s address to Congress

Workers fired in Donald Trump’s mass purge of the federal government will attend his address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday at the invitation of Democrats seeking to display the human costs of the president’s radical policies.

Senior Democrats, including the party’s leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, have invited laid-off military veterans as their guests in an attempt to embarrass Trump over the unbridled assault on the federal bureaucracy spearheaded by Elon Musk and his so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) team.

In moves supposedly aimed at rooting out waste and corruption, Musk – the billionaire tech entrepreneur who has emerged as a central figure in Trump’s administration – has shuttered USAid and laid off at least 200,000 workers in multiple other agencies.

The mass firings have affected workers in Republican congressional districts, some of whom voted for Trump, and GOP members of Congress have been assailed by constituents at town hall meetings.

“What the Democrats are showing with our guests is that it’s the American people who are being hurt by the actions of Elon Musk and Donald Trump,” Brad Schneider, a Democratic member of the House of Representatives from Illinois, told the New York Times.

The invitations have been extended by some Democrats in lieu of boycotting the event, as some prominent lawmakers are doing, including Chris Murphy, a Senator from Connecticut who has emerged as a leading voice in critiquing Trump’s policies.

Schneider said he would attend with Adam Mulvey, an army veteran who was fired from his job as an emergency management specialist at a federal health centre in Chicago.

Another Democratic member of Congress, Joe Courtney of Connecticut, will attend with Gabriel D’Alatri, a former Marine, who lost his job at the Internal Revenue Service five days before his probation period ended in a reported indiscriminate mass purge of recent hires who were still on probation.

Courtney said the case of D’Altari – who told the Times he had voted for Trump in last November’s election – exposed the administration’s jobs-slashing effort as “indiscriminate and mindless”.

D’Altari said he had been terminated for “performance issues” despite never having received a negative performance review. He hoped his appearance would inspire Trump to sign an executive order instructing the rehiring of probationers who were fired en masse.

Schumer, a senator for New York, has invited Alissa Ellman, a disabled army veteran who served in Afghanistan and was recently fired from her job at the Veterans Affairs department in Buffalo.

“This is not how you treat our veterans – it’s not just unacceptable, it’s un-American,” Schumer said. “Jobs and care for our veterans in upstate New York is not government waste.”

In response, a White House spokesman, Harrison Fields, accused the Democrats of “exploiting the American people for political points”.

Trump has repeatedly praised Musk’s work and insisted he has uncovered billions of dollars of fraud in the federal government.