The longtime anti-tax activist and prominent Trump supporter Grover Norquist once said: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” You don’t have to listen hard to hear the water running.

As the government shutdown enters its second month, we are witnessing an unprecedented effort by the administration to starve out federal employees, decimate the agencies we compose, and undermine the very foundation of the civil service. Unprecedented – but not unexpected.

From Trump’s campaign pledge to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, to his budget blueprint in 2017 proposing the elimination of 19 federal agencies ranging from the Chemical Safety Board to the National Endowment for the Arts, the president has been gunning for the federal sector for years. He implemented a federal hiring freeze in the first days of his term. Following that with a $1.5tn tax cut, Trump and congressional Republicans set the stage for budget shortfalls – and their attendant cuts to services – for years to come.

The president was less effective in his second year. Last summer, he aimed to gut what’s left of federal labor protections with three executive orders that were later largely struck down by the courts. These orders were paired with a proposal to eliminate or hollow out several agencies, consistent with the vision of the small-government fundamentalists that surround Trump. But, like the executive orders, Trump’s proposal remains only a proposal, without legislative support.

Trump appears to see the shutdown as his opportunity to press on, outside of pesky legal constraints, to win the political fight against “big government”. Last week, the Daily Caller ran a piece from an anonymous “senior official in the Trump administration” that called on the president to continue the shutdown for “a very long time” in order to slash the federal workforce by “smoking out the resistance”. A long shutdown, the official argued, could demonstrate “that government is better when smaller”.

Lest anyone get the impression that this “senior official” couldn’t get a hearing for this strategy with their boss, Trump shared the editorial with his 57 million Twitter followers.

Many federal workers are still in denial. Sure, we’re angry – especially those of us not getting paid. But there’s little sense that there’s anything we can do. In today’s political context, calling our congressional representatives is understood to be even less effective than it’s ever been. The painful and demoralizing truth for us federal workers is that we’ve never had great friends in Congress, no matter how many times we’ve called.

Since the 1970s, the erosion of the public sector has been overseen by both parties (one, undeniably, more enthusiastic than the other). And even during the prior decades, when the federal sector was expanding, political leaders of both parties were careful to carve out and preserve exceptions to the rights of public employees. To this day, it is not only illegal for federal workers to strike, but, according to the same statute, it is illegal for us to even assert the right to strike. The dubious constitutionality of such a clause aside, it has had its intended effect. Our mere discussion of a federal strike – to say nothing of others’ explicit endorsement of such an action – compels us to author opinions anonymously.

Leaving aside the strike question, one must understand that federal workers are bullied even when it comes to the most elementary political activity. Consider the Hatch Act, which prohibits lobbying or partisan electoral activity on the clock. The act’s reasonable restrictions are designed to guard against graft, but are being weaponized by agency bosses against any political speech. Consider last week’s internal email to FAA employees, which conflates at-work partisan activity with “remarks made in any forum”.

Under such a vindictive administration as this one, we expect such memos of intimidation to become commonplace anytime our collective indignation starts to outweigh our fears. This tactic by management of overstating the restrictions of the Hatch Act works in a particularly insidious way. A shocking number of federal employees believe that basic constitutional protections do not apply to themselves.

So those calling for a TSA strike or French-style mass pickets will forgive us for treading lightly while some of our colleagues believe their jobs to be at risk for far less. But the authors’ points are well-taken. The truth is that without a pushback from organized labor, more and more of the civil service continues to face ever deeper cuts. The question we should be asking is not whether federal workers will, can or should strike. There’s a different question, more immediately relevant to all of organized labor.

How can federal workers and the jobs that we do – from protecting health and the environment to collecting taxes to maintaining public infrastructure and security – become central commitments of our society again? How can the broader labor movement start to see the modest first steps of rank and file federal workers as the necessary next steps toward defending the public sector from the privatizers and the deregulators?

Tuesday night, at a church kitchen in Montclair, New Jersey, federal workers and their families gathered for a free dinner and groceries donated by local businesses and supporters. This Friday, in lower Manhattan, a small union local that represents federal workers who are not furloughed will be hosting a similar event for the benefit of those who are.

Small, morale-boosting events like these may not rise to the level necessary to force an end to the shutdown. Nevertheless, they demonstrate a craving for the kind of solidarity that might begin to tip the balance in our favor. So organized labor could support such efforts where they emerge, or help get them going in locations with concentrations of federal staff.

Such solidarity, of course, must be a two-way street and federal workers can do our part by, for example, refusing to scab on striking teachers such as Denver public schools have asked local feds to do. In truth, we have a lot to learn from such teachers and, like the rest of the country, we are taking notes.

But more than anything else, federal workers need solidarity from the broader labor movement: actual material support while we are locked out or forced to work without pay can help bring us to our feet. We need all unions to defend the role of the public sector and the integrity of civil service against small government fanatics. And we need political repression and intimidation in federal agencies to be understood as a threat to all of labor.

If you want to see federal workers run, you can offer a hand, help get us on to our feet and walk with us.