Advocacy groups taking it to the streets to push back against Trump and Musk cuts to federal agencies

March 16’s forecast qualified as a First Alert Weather Day – high winds, lightning, heavy rain, hail and possible tornadoes predicted throughout the region. And Indivisible Pittsburgh and its partner organizations had an Oakland march and protest against U.S. Department of Education cuts planned for 12:30 p.m.

Organizers canceled the walking part, watched weather reports closely and posted on social media about it. Organizers counted about 250 people who still showed up, huddling under Schenley Plaza’s large pavilion when high winds, rain and hail came through near the start time. After about 10 minutes it stopped. A sign?

The rally went on. The six speakers that day addressed the protest theme Stop Fascism, Protect Education, railing against the Trump administration’s fast-track agenda to gut the department and its programs. They urged everyone present to fight back and implored others to do the same.

It’s just one of the actions Indivisible Pittsburgh has organized during the past two months, attracting large crowds and motivating people to call, email and write federal officials. It worked with other partners at the Oakland event and four other protests, including two in Squirrel Hill that attracted thousands, organizers said.

The next protest – Hands Off! – will take place Saturday, April 5, at the City County Building, Downtown Pittsburgh, starting at 12:30 p.m. Indivisible Pittsburgh Director Tracy Baton said 900 people had signed up for at the end of March, with partners and speakers are still coming on board.

Other groups – Discord, Mondays With(OUT) McCormick, and Red Wine and Blue, for example – also are holding protests and taking advocacy actions, with organizers helping each other and joining forces. The result: Momentum is growing throughout the region, Baton said.

“The movement is growing in many ways,” Baton said. “While our events are building, other people are organizing. I love it. Fill the streets everywhere you are. Get out there, America. It’s our free speech while it lasts.”

Indivisible Pittsburgh’s April 5 rally will focus on proposed and looming cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ health care and other benefits, Social Security, reproductive rights, libraries, LGBTQ+ rights, and more.

“We want Elon Musk and his appointed functionaries and [President Donald J.] Trump to be hands-off things that make things good for ordinary Americans,” Baton said. She said Congress has enacted the agencies and departments and approved funding, and people need to fight back against taking it away.

The national Indivisible website lists seven Pittsburgh-area groups connected to it. In addition to the Pittsburgh group, people have started them in Cranberry, Mt. Lebanon, Sewickley, Shadyside and the southwest region. Baton said another one is organizing in Regent Square.

Next up is pushing for more groups in Beaver, Butler, Blair, Cambria, Somerset and other rural counties. Residents there may have more to lose than those living in urban areas.

“I know people out there who feel there is no one out there helping them,” Baton said.  “They are getting their Medicaid cut. [The funding cuts are] already closing some rural health care facilities.  They need a platform and a place.” 

The national organization provides directions, including a toolkit, for new groups. Baton said she has also worked with MoveOn and utilized its resources.

Indivisible Pittsburgh has 9,000 followers on its Facebook page, and she said the group hopes to have its own website online soon. Current and upcoming rallies and protests, with links to partner groups’ and organizations’ efforts, can be found there.

Baton said attendees write letters to elected officials demanding their attention to key issues at every Indivisible Pittsburgh event. Organizers want people to create and bring posters to these protests, posting photos of them beforehand to spread the word.

“It’s important to keep people in the street and demanding,” she added.

The social worker and community activist is following the lead of her grandmother and her mother. At the March 16 rally, Baton noted it was appropriate for her to be near the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning. She spent hours there as a child while her mother studied and attended classes. When she took undergraduate classes there, Baton led anti-apartheid protests and traveled to South Africa as a Fullbright Fellow.

Most of her professional career has centered on helping LGBTQ+ people, especially Black and people of color. She has worked for the Hugh Lane Wellness Foundation and the Community Empowerment Association. Other advocacy work included directing the Pittsburgh unit of the Women’s March on Washington, starting with the 2017 event held after Trump’s first inauguration.  

Is she thinking positively that all this will stop the cuts and restore services? Baton right now is rooted in the present. “I can say nothing but that resistance must happen,” she said. “I will resist today and tomorrow. It may take a generation for change [to happen].”

Mondays With(OUT) McCormick, a group that picks up where Tuesdays with Toomey left off, is led by a group of people, including Baton. Some of the other organizers are Dana Kellerman, Joe DeFazio, Laura McCarthy, Carolyn Gibbs and Carrie Wardzinski.

The group has held protests outside Sen. David McCormick’s Pittsburgh office in theDowntown’s Grant Building, much like it did at the Pittsburgh office of former U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey, a fellow Republican from the Lehigh Valley. It also urges its members and followers to email, call and write to the new senator on legislation he supports that they oppose.

Wardzinski had been working with Red Wine and Blue until recently, a national women’s activist nonprofit organization. Many Red Wine and Blue’s activities and events occur online. One recent Zoom session of dealing with difficult people had more than 800 participants.

More than 20 people attended a February event at Panera in Pleasant Hills, with women traveling from Cranberry, Shaler and Washington County to listen to Wardzinski and explain why they wanted to become active.

Several said they had been registered Republicans who can’t bear the direction of their party and switched registration or became independents. One woman from Cranberry said she traveled to Pleasant Hills because she is the only person on her street concerned about the Trump administration’s actions and needed support.

Red Wine and Blue Pennsylvania Director Sherry Luce said the same is happening across the state. People register for events and bring friends.

Luce joined Red Wine and Blue in August 2022 after watching one of its events on Instagram with several friends. She’s always been politically active, and when someone told her about a part-time organizer position available with the organization, she applied. Luce moved on to a full-time position and then became the state director.

“I am meeting the most amazing people,” she said. “I love what we stand for … getting women engaged,” she said. “We are getting people who are never politically involved. We really are an on ramp to get women engaged.”

The organization founded by Katie Paris started in Ohio after Trump’s first win. She met over a few glasses of wine with women who were similarly concerned about what would follow, and that led to its name. Right now it has 600,000 members across the country, with 27,000 of those from Pennsylvania. Allegheny County has about 2,300 members, Luce said.  It touts its successes in the 2023 elections on its website.

Red White and Blue has boots on the ground in five states with paid staff and teams, normally six in each. The response has been so overwhelming nationally that the group started TroubleNation. 

The organization just celebrated that this new initiative is active in all 50 states with 726 TroubleNation groups. On its website, Red White and Blue describes it as “a full-service organizing support system that provides one-on-one coaching, new group orientation, small-group, customized training for group leaders, monthly happy hours, and continuous engagement from the Red Wine & Blue team.”

Luce said when women who come to her staff wanting to start a group where they live, they help them. She added that some of these groups focus on specific issues, others on school boards. “They are having amazing events out there,” she said. “[There’s] just so many who want to be heard and want to do something.”

With the lack of federal elections this year, Luce said her staff is focusing on local, county and state races. Especially at the local level, what she sees everywhere – including her home district – are local officials making bad policy on culture war issues that will land them in courtrooms. Two good examples: transgender athletes and book bans.

“The time and money they are spending on such a few [transgender] students when they could do things like making sure their curriculum is up to date, their infrastructure is safe for students,” she explained. “For some reasons these extremist candidates are taking on culture wars that they are creating. They forget their key audiences: first, students; second, taxpayers.”

The theme she and her staff push is “when they go low, we go local.” The state’s 500 public school districts each will elect four members this year. The goal is to “support commonsense candidates running against the extremists,” Luce said. If voters elect just two, it can change the direction of the school board. That is especially true because candidates can cross file on the ballots in Pennsylvania to garner more votes.

While the same advocacy can occur with city, borough and township elections, she is very concerned with the onslaught of dark money in this year’s state Supreme Court justice retention election.

Luce, her staff and volunteers held events in Lititz, Hershey and York in March to urge participants to take meaningful action at the state and local level. It offers residents a one-page FAQ sheet about school districts and school board elections.

She stressed that local organizing can grow and then affect national elections, and because of that, it will keep offering in person and online events providing advice and direction. In April it will hold four in-person events on the Sunshine Act and Right to Know Law to empower citizens. It’s very important, Luce said, that taxpayers and residents advocating for education know what their school boards are doing, pointing to efforts to ban books and restrict teachers and administrators.

 A prime example of this is the Pine-Richland School District. After a series of packed meetings – some lasting seven hours – on March 17 the board voted 5-4 on a library policy giving itself, rather than the superintendent, the power to add or remove books.

For someone attuned to political issues, elections and more, Luce found out just by chance that in her Radnor school district, a very blue suburban area outside of Philadelphia, a move was afoot to ban books. So these efforts can occur in secret, she said, and people need to fight back.

From her perspective, all the groups at the national, state and local levels will work hard to do so.

“We’re awake now,” she said. “They can call it woke. I call it engaged.”

CLARIFICATION and CORRECTION: This story originally underestimated the crowd at the March 16 Oakland rally and mentioned a Waterworks Shopping Plaza Red Wine and Blue event that in fact was cancelled.