AOC Did Something

I posted this video of AOC addressing some federal workers in NYC last week at Balloon-Juice on Saturday. It hasn’t been widely reported, but if you go to around 6:30 in this video, you’ll see that the following set of events occurred:

• Two weeks ago, she got word that the DOGE team was trying to infiltrate the Department of Labor and that they were going to try to intimidate the non-partisan workers there to turn over sensitive information.

• She lists off the consequences of that data being compromised (jobs report, economic data, etc.)

• Her source told her the DOGErs were going to be there around 4PM.

• She drafted a letter reminding the Department of Labor of their legal responsibilities, walked over the DoL, got in the building, and dropped the letter off with the people who DOGErs were going to pressure, and remind them of their legal obligations. They said that they could make sure it went through the proper channels (solicitor general, etc.)

• She got there at 3:30. At 4, when the DOGErs arrived, the DoL officials told them that they made a promise and can’t hand over the data right now.

She points out that everything she did would be something where people could say “that won’t work” or “that doesn’t matter”, but she did it and it did work. Do I think that this will keep the DOGErs at bay? Probably not, but if every department had done this, we’d be in a better place.

So, yeah, she did something. No excuses were given.

(Also, editor’s note - this is an example of the kind of post that I won’t be posting at Balloon Juice.)