Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto via AP
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) union, representing members of the TSA, held a picket outside Norfolk International Airport, March 25, 2025, to protest anti-union actions by the Trump administration.
There’s no question that the events of the past week have seen some federal employees engage in activities that compromised national security. National Security Adviser Michael Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s discussion of an impending attack against Houthi forces in Yemen, and then real-time discussion of that attack as it unfolded, shared in a private chat outside official secured channels that for some bizarre reason included a journalist Waltz invited, doubtless confirmed the perceptions of America’s enemies and friends that President Trump’s national-security team is composed of dullards and doofuses who couldn’t defend America’s interests if their lives, and ours, depended on it—which, of course, they do.
On Thursday night, Trump did Waltz one better by saying he was moved to shore up national security by stripping collective-bargaining rights from perhaps one million federal employees, none of whom had anything to do with a security breach, much less one so appalling as Hegseth and Waltz’s.
Elections have consequences, of course, and as a result of the most recent one, we’ve gone from the most pro-union presidential administration in American history to the most anti-union one—at a time when unions’ approval rating of 71 percent dwarfs that of either party and of Donald Trump and Elon Musk as well. No American employer, public or private, has ever trashed so many duly agreed-to contracts as Trump just did, or destroyed the collective-bargaining rights of so many American workers.
The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 codified in law much of the executive order first promulgated by President Kennedy in 1962, which gave federal employees collective-bargaining rights, though not including the right to strike or the right to bargain for wages, which were to be set by Congress. The 1978 law reinforced those rights and those exclusions, and gave presidents the power to exempt workers in national-security agencies from its provisions. Until Thursday night, those agencies were the CIA, the FBI, and kindred organizations—not the Food and Drug Administration, the Agriculture Department’s food safety inspectors, or the doctors, nurses, and orderlies in Veterans Health Administration hospitals, all of whom abruptly lost their right to bargain over working conditions and grievances due to Trump’s executive orders.
According to a story in Government Executive, Trump’s executive order applies to departments and agencies that employ 67 percent of federal employees and to 75 percent of unionized federal workers. Roughly one-third of federal workers are veterans. The number of workers covered under Trump’s order is so large that it would probably reduce the number of unionized American workers, both public- and private-sector, by somewhere between 5 and 10 percent.
No mystery attends Trump’s reason for seeking to cripple and perhaps even abolish federal unions. The fact sheet that the White House released to enumerate the agencies affected and to justify its order briefly said the president had issued the order to protect national security, but also complained, with more specificity, that:
Certain Federal unions have declared war on President Trump’s agenda. The largest Federal union describes itself as “fighting back” against Trump. It is widely filing grievances to block Trump policies. For example, VA’s unions have filed 70 national and local grievances over President Trump’s policies since the inauguration—an average of over one a day.
In other words, this is explicit political retaliation. (By the way, the reason that workers at the VA have pushed back may have something to do with Trump and Musk’s orders to reduce staffing and hence services to veterans in need of the health care services the VA provides, and also with the explicit commitment the government makes to veterans to offer them federal employment when their term of duty in the armed services ends.)
The reference to the “largest federal union” that is fighting back against the Trump/Musk campaign to slash government services is to the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which has not gone quietly into the dark night of the mass reduction of necessary public services and the workers who deliver them. AFGE has filed many of the suits questioning the legality of Trump’s wholesale dismissals and abolition of agencies established by acts of Congress. On Friday, AFGE President Everett Kelley announced the filing of another such suit contesting Trump’s move to strip collective-bargaining rights from workers on the basis of his national-security claims. Kelly noted that federal workers have enjoyed these rights throughout the Cold War and every hot war the U.S. has engaged in since 1962, without any president (or anyone else) arguing these rights had in any way endangered national security.
Trump’s executive order is groundbreaking, but at the same time just one part of his broader campaign to destroy the federal government—or more precisely, to replace it with a Versailles-like court in service of a monarch (him) whose word, rather than the Constitution, is law. It came in the same week that the leaders of virtually every governmental agency vowed to slash their workforce by somewhere between 8 and 50 percent. It came in the same week that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ordered the dismissal of 20,000 HHS employees. (I doubt we’ll hear much from Kennedy about his uncle’s decision to grant federal workers their right to collectively bargain.) And it was heralded, earlier this month, by Trump’s Department of Transportation unilaterally repudiating the contract the department had signed just last year (when Joe Biden was president) with its unionized security screeners, which was to have been in place until 2031.
On Friday, eight of the agencies affected by Trump’s order filed a case in a federal court in Waco, Texas—which has only one judge, a decided Trump acolyte—to negate their current contracts with their employees’ unions. None of these agencies are headquartered in Waco; this is simply an example of the court-shopping that Republicans and the administration were complaining about as recently as Thursday in cases where other federal judges had ruled against other Trump executive orders. When AFGE’s attorneys appear in the court in which they’ve filed, they’re certain to argue that the vast majority of the agencies covered by Trump’s latest order cannot reasonably be construed as focusing on national security. That’s an argument that some judges could readily embrace, even as the federal bench has often shown scant interest in upholding workers’ rights.
Whether unions will do more than going to court—and campaigning for Democrats in 2026—is not at all clear. Striking the federal government would give Trump a clear legal right to fire the strikers, the same excuse Reagan used against PATCO. That doesn’t preclude taking to the streets during workers’ time off, and I suspect that unions will now urge their members and their members’ friends to help swell upcoming anti-Trump & Musk demonstrations, such as those scheduled for April 5th.
A postscript (or Postscript): I suspect D.C.-based federal employees who just lost their right to bargain constitute a significant share of the dwindling number of subscribers to The Washington Post, and that a large number of regular Post readers who live in metro D.C. are opposed to and distressed by Trump’s order, as well. A number of the remaining Post columnists are certain to be dismayed or even outraged by Trump’s order, too; whether they can actually get the paper to run columns expressing that viewpoint, no matter how widely shared by Post readers, is unlikely, given owner Jeff Bezos’s pronunciamentos favoring limitless freedom for top executives and expressing his boundless hatred for unions.
