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public workers
Why Ours Became the First US Pension Fund to Cease New Tesla Stock Purchases
Tesla no longer behaves like a company focused on innovation, customer loyalty, or product integrity. It behaves like a company driven by ego.
May 08, 2025
As the controller of Lehigh County and a pension board member, I am entrusted with safeguarding public workers' retirement savings—people who fix our roads, teach our children, and keep our community running. This duty requires more than spreadsheets. It demands foresight, integrity, and courage when risks outweigh rewards. Public pensions are not just private retirements—they are public trusts. Every dollar mismanaged today becomes a broken promise tomorrow.
That's why I introduced a resolution, which our board passed, to halt new Tesla stock purchases in our actively managed funds.
Tesla's earnings have collapsed by 71% compared to last year. Auto revenues are down 20%. Sales in Germany plummeted 76% in February. Tesla lost 49% of its market share in China while BYD gained 161%. General Motors, once dismissed as outdated, now leads domestic electric Vehicle sales with a 50% increase in 2024. Its price-to-earnings ratio, how much investors pay for every dollar the company earns, is wildly inflated compared to industry norms. That kind of mismatch isn't a vote of confidence; it's a flashing warning light.
Public pension boards have long been treated as silent partners in the economy. But silence is no longer neutral. We are shareholders in the future, and that gives us responsibility.
But the numbers tell only part of the story. Tesla is bleeding trust.
The company's CEO, Elon Musk, has made himself a spectacle. He dismantled Twitter's identity on a whim, and now, by becoming a symbol of political division, he's destabilizing one of America's most recognizable brands. The consequences are already here: public walkouts, showroom protests, declining global sales.
For those of us managing public money, those signs matter. Tesla no longer behaves like a company focused on innovation, customer loyalty, or product integrity. It behaves like a company driven by ego. That is not a foundation we can trust with our employees' retirements.
This is why we voted to pause. We also requested that our investment consultant provide a complete accounting of our exposure.
We are not alone in this concern. Dutch and Danish pension funds have already divested. Canada's largest public-sector union has called for action. In the U.S., state treasurers and union leaders are beginning to raise similar alarms. Momentum is building, and it's grounded in a simple reality: Fiduciary responsibility must be insulated from erratic leadership.
Tesla has spent years fighting off unions, firing organizers, intimidating workers, and refusing to sign collective bargaining agreements. But now, the stability it has rejected might be the only thing that can restore what it has lost. Unions don't just raise wages, they stabilize companies. They create guardrails that protect against reckless leadership and ensure that decision-makers are accountable not just to shareholders, but to the people who build the product. A unionized workforce would offer not just internal structure, but public credibility. When workers have power, companies are held to account.
I urge public pension funds nationwide, especially those shaped by organized labor, including the United Auto Workers, to look hard at their Tesla holdings. These funds represent the collective strength of working people. They should not underwrite volatility, reward self-interest, or ignore risk. Coordinated action by labor-aligned funds can do more than shift portfolios; it can send a clear message to the market: Long-term value isn't earned through celebrity or chaos, but through companies that treat their workers, customers, and shareholders like they matter.
There is a connection between morality and capitalism. Profit built on spectacle crumbles quickly. But profit built on trust, stability, and accountability, that endures. That's the kind of return our retirees deserve.
Public pension boards have long been treated as silent partners in the economy. But silence is no longer neutral. We are shareholders in the future, and that gives us responsibility. We can't build a just economy while funding its collapse. If our dollars prop up instability, then silence is complicity.
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The Devastating Impacts of Trump's War on Workers: A Personal Dispatch
Before all this started, life was pretty good for families like mine, who live here and depend on the federal government for work.
Apr 03, 2025
The second administration of President Donald J. Trump has already started working its special magic across the Washington, D.C. capital region. Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have fired tens of thousands of federal workers, with more to come. Those who have lost their jobs include people who find housing and other support for veterans struggling with mental illness. They include civil servants who maintained safeguards to prevent our nuclear weapons from becoming dirty bombs. They include healthcare researchers developing treatments for cancer and other killer diseases; workers who ensured that low-income, homeless, and rural students were able to get an education; agricultural researchers who opened up international markets to American farmers; and too many others to mention here.
My neighborhood, located on farmland about 40 miles outside Washington, D.C., is among those wracked by this administration’s shakeup of the government workforce. An estimated 20% of our country’s federal workers make their homes right here in Maryland and in nearby Virginia within reach of the capital. And that doesn’t count the tens of thousands of us who work in (or adjacent to) federal agencies as contractors. All those workers have also been subjected to the same back-to-work requirements, anti-DEI policies, and (depending on their roles) job insecurity, as their government colleagues.
To see how this administration’s attack on federal workers penetrates everyday life, look no further than the lives of children in local public schools.
President Trump, his unelected right-hand man and billionaire businessman Elon Musk, and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) began wreaking havoc on government agencies in late January with a poorly formatted, emotionally worded PDF that some in the civil service initially mistook for a phishing email. That “fork in the road” document offered workers a chance to take eight months of severance pay, or else face the possibility of simply losing their jobs — a possibility that turned out to be all too real for those who risked staying and continuing to serve.
I hope that red state voters are happy.
My Own Deep State
Before all this started, life was pretty good for families like mine, who live here and depend on the federal government for work. Of course, I have to admit that, by many measures, we are privileged in so many ways: A White, upper-middle-class, dual-income (for now) family, with healthy kids, cats, and even a raucous flock of chickens. And as of yet, many families like mine are still fine. But for how long?
I think the wholesomeness of life in my area of Maryland owes much to the diverse cultures represented in our communities. You don’t need to look hard to find someone who can tell you about customs, food, norms, and rituals in places as far away as Afghanistan, China, El Salvador, Ukraine, and elsewhere. (Maryland has long offered broad protections to refugees and asylum seekers.) Until recently, the military and the civil service also cast wide nets in their recruitment and anti-discriminatory hiring practices, coming up with some of the best of the best in every field, regardless of national origin.
To the cultural anthropologist in me, this diversity offers remarkable wealth. You can drive a few minutes from my house and get the crispest Peruvian chicken, the most fragrant Salvadoran pupusas, the tenderest Afghan kabobs. Kids growing up here have a chance to understand the world and international affairs in an up-close-and-personal way. My kids grasp just why democracy and peace are so important, because they know other kids whose families fled authoritarian dictators. They also get why hanging out with people who are different from you is both challenging and rewarding.
Another aspect of life here in the capital region that I value is the high-quality services accessible to many, if not (unfortunately) all — from well-funded Medicaid and Medicare health clinics, to nearby Veterans Administration and military hospitals, to cutting-edge treatments at the National Institutes of Health for sickle cell anemia and cancer, including for those around the country who can’t afford to travel here on their own dime. Until recently, at least.
I think you’d find it hard to fault our federal government for not providing for those in its backyard, at least in my county, which is admittedly the wealthiest in Maryland. Schoolchildren visit science and art museums for free. There are outdoor marvels like national monuments, sprawling botanical gardens, and hiking trails that, at least until recently, have been remarkably well maintained. Whatever you make of those who have made careers running our government, I see how federal facilities and their workers have made my community safer, more exciting to live in, and more beautiful.
In the age of Trump, I fear it’s goodbye to all that, not to speak of a Department of Education. (Who needs education after all?)
Elon Musk, DOGE, and Mass Firings
Unfortunately, just a little more than two months after Donald Trump entered the White House for the second time, that beauty is diminishing. Already, the D.C. area and its suburbs are bearing the economic brunt of his and Elon Musk’s cuts because federal jobs form the backbone of the local economy. Since military veterans make up about a third of the federal workforce, they have been disproportionately affected by DOGE’s slashing of jobs, with at least 6,000 veterans nationally losing their employment, including in this area.
The federal workforce is more racially diverse than the private sector, meaning that those firings will impact minorities particularly strongly. In addition, as most of us already know, DOGE has been targeting the federal staff responsible for enforcing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which people of color and women are more likely to say are important to ensure that they succeed in the workplace. And that’s without even mentioning the way DEI programs allow women who are being sexually harassed or Black employees facing racial slurs to seek redress. People implementing DEI programs are also responsible for ensuring that nursing parents get safe, clean places to pump breastmilk, while protecting many of us — White men included — whose extenuating circumstances (eldercare at home, difficulties entering buildings due to disabilities) would otherwise make work senselessly harder, if not inconceivable.
And make no mistake, DOGE’s firings have nothing to do with efficiency. If the Trump administration cared about that, it wouldn’t have launched itself by firing the inspector generals who were charged with identifying projects responsible for tens of billions of dollars in waste and fraud.
At best, I suspect such cuts reflect real resentment over problems our government does indeed need to address (like why insufficient stable and well-paid jobs exist in large pockets of this country), and consequently, the need for our leaders to create the appearance of “getting things done.” At worst, they reflect a deep spitefulness and Musk’s desire to line his pockets, as every good profiteer does in times of conflict (though I don’t think he ever expected the stock value of his line of cars to fall through the floor).
Back to a Military Lifestyle
Let me describe a few of the costs of Trump’s war on the home front on federal workers. The lucky ones in my community, like us, are those who still have their jobs. But nearly everyone with a federal job now has to commute daily to his or her office in order to meet Musk’s return-to-work requirements. Telework is a privilege that most white-collar workers across this country got to enjoy in the Covid years and thereafter, though civil servants and military personnel have strict requirements to prove they are indeed working. Moreover, research suggests that, surprisingly enough, people who work from home are often more productive, due to fewer distractions and more time made available without lengthy commutes.
Under the new return-to-work mandate, folks I know in the broader Maryland-Virginia area around Washington now often have to commute hours on a daily basis in punishing traffic or decide to try to move closer to their work. Former military families like mine may have thought that the days of long separations from their loved ones, due to deployments and 16- to 18-hour work shifts, were a thing of the past. Now, however, our family has less time to help with the kids’ homework, less time for me to earn a sorely needed living, and (again for me, alone with kids into the evening) more housework and childcare. (I can’t help but think that this last aspect was part of Musk’s whole point.) Stress, exhaustion, and their close relative — loneliness — now permeate our lives and those of so many others. Even health problems that emerged when our family was actively engaged in military service have resurfaced.
As many who have served in the military can attest, it’s hard to quantify the stress of living at the whims of abusive commanders who see needless suffering as a feature, not a detriment, of military service. And now such attitudes are being transferred to civilian life. Consider, for example, Trump’s appointee to lead the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, who has said that he actually wants federal workers to be “in trauma.” I consider that hazing on a national scale.
During our military service, for some in my family and community, there was at least a sense of contributing to a wider purpose: serving a government that pledged allegiance to the American people rather than to one man.
As we deal with the fallout of DOGE policies, I can only imagine the kinds of wait times that military health facilities are going to have with a gutted government in the second age of America’s very own You Know Who.
“A Protest a Day Keeps the Fascists Away!”
To see how this administration’s attack on federal workers penetrates everyday life, look no further than the lives of children in local public schools. Typically, for military kids and many others, school provides a respite from the uncertainties of messy family life. Schools also provide regular meals, uninterrupted adult attention, a predictable schedule — sometimes even healthcare. At my kids’ elementary school, which is still fantastically resourced and run, they are starting to hear from their friends about parents who have lost their jobs and are dealing with spiking food prices and an abysmal local job market. Meanwhile, beloved classmates from immigrant families are preparing to leave the country for fear of harassment, separation from other family members, or worse.
The problem with cruelty as a governing strategy is that it spreads like wildfire among the nation’s loneliest– even the youngest ones. Recently, my older child started coming home from school sick to his stomach because a peer had told him that Trump was a role model for “making America great again” through his deportations of immigrants — and his two best friends both happen to be foreign-born kids of color. Even when a kid repeatedly claims that immigrants commit crimes and spread disease, it’s difficult for a school counselor to intervene, given that those racial slurs come directly from the highest office in our land.
Since public school can offer exposure to just such grim sentiments, I’m not surprised that schoolchildren like mine have come out with some of the most courageous statements against the Trump administration’s malice. Take, for example, the middle schoolers at a military post in Stuttgart, Germany, who staged a walkout to protest Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s DEI purge of books and curricula related to race, gender, and sexuality, or the online record of a 12 year-old protesting to support his mom, fired from the Department of Education.
My son recently came home from a rough day of standing up to the little urchin harassing him and his friends, and started to craft his own political posters, as he imagined one day running for office. He then put them on his window facing the world beyond our house. One of them reads, “Make America Great Again,” with two lines through it. Underneath, he wrote, “Make America Better Than Great. We All Belong.” And underneath that, in small red letters: “Help us.”
Fellow progressives who are searching for strong leaders: How about instead helping ensure that more of us lead from where we are by speaking out! In our national culture, infused with Trump’s cult of personality, it’s easy to forget that we Americans are the government. The real waste and fraud happens when we miss opportunities to stand up for each other, or when, out of fear, we nod and smile at injustice.
Young kids who call out hate, injustice, and hypocrisy should be role models for the rest of us. They have everything to lose. They can’t look for a new job, move to Canada, or hire a lawyer. All they have is the truth (unless some adult is feeding them grown-up Trumpian poison) and they hold the truth dear.
More people speaking out will make it harder for Musk and Trump to destroy institutions that did many things so well most Americans didn’t even realize they were behind the scenes. As Democratic Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin said recently at a teach-in I attended: “A protest a day keeps the fascists away!”
In the meantime, please consider what I’ve shared about my community as a sort of canary-in-the-coal-mine warning that, unless more people — including you and your neighbors — speak out, too, we can expect the end of American democracy.
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