Rather than boycott President Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress, some Democratic lawmakers are inviting former federal workers to the speech on Tuesday as a way to protest the mass firings and funding cuts that have defined Mr. Trump’s first month back in office.
Federal workers’ treatment by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has energized constituents across the country in recent weeks, with many overloading lawmakers’ phone lines and showing up at town halls to voice their displeasure.
“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,” said Representative Brad Schneider, Democrat of Illinois. Mr. Schneider said he chose not to skip the address — other Democrats such as Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut have said they won’t attend — so that the president “didn’t get a free pass” and would see the effects his administration has had on people.
When asked for comment, a White House spokesman, Harrison Fields, said Democrats were “exploiting the American people for political points.”
Mr. Schneider’s guest, Adam Mulvey, is a 20-year Army veteran who in February was terminated from his role as an emergency management specialist at a federal health center in North Chicago that serves both veteran and active-duty personnel.
Also invited to the address is Gabriel D’Alatri, a Marine Corps veteran and former Internal Revenue Service project manager from Connecticut who was fired just five days before he completed his probationary period. Mr. D’Alatri said his termination letter indicated that he was fired for “performance issues” even though he never had a bad performance review.
“It came as a shock to me and my family,” said Mr. D’Alatri, who will attend Mr. Trump’s address as a guest of his congressman, Representative Joe Courtney, Democrat of Connecticut. As an I.R.S. project manager, Mr. D’Alatri managed the department’s facilities in Connecticut and also coordinated reasonable accommodation requests for employees with disabilities. Mr. D’Alatri said that he voted for Mr. Trump in November and that it was too early to decide whether or not he regretted his choice.
Mr. Courtney said his constituent’s story was an example of how “indiscriminate and mindless” the Trump administration’s cuts had been.
Mr. D’Alatri said he hoped that by sharing his story and attending the address, the Trump administration would sign an executive order to rehire all veterans who were on probation and fired en masse.
“I like to think that veterans are a nonpolitical issue,” Mr. D’Alatri said. “For us to be thrown to the side like that, I wasn’t expecting that to happen.”
Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, has invited Alissa Ellman, a disabled Army veteran who served in Afghanistan. Mr. Schumer said she 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,” Mr. Schumer said in a statement. “Jobs and care for our veterans in Upstate New York is not government waste.”
Representative Chrissy Houlahan, Democrat of Pennsylvania, invited Jessica Malarik Fair, a constituent who was an architect at Valley Forge National Park tasked with restoring George Washington’s office in preparation for the country’s 250th anniversary next year.
“I hope people will understand that these are actual human beings and not just numbers that we can sort of strike arbitrarily,” said Ms. Houlahan, “and that they represent work that will no longer happen on behalf of all of us.”
Ms. Malarik Fair, who also lost her job last month in the firing of probationary employees, hopes she can be one more face to humanize the federal work force for Americans.
“I’m proud of the work that I was doing there, and I’m anything but corrupt or lazy,” she said.
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