Trump Just Ripped Up Federal Workers’ Union Contracts
Yesterday the Trump administration ordered 18 government agencies to terminate their collective bargaining agreements and cease union negotiations. The move could strip hundreds of thousands of federal workers of their union protections.
President Donald Trump speaks to the press before signing an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House on March 26, 2025. (Win McNamee / Getty Images)
President Donald Trump has taken significant steps to limit union rights for many federal workers through a new executive order. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announced Thursday that Trump’s order instructs numerous government agencies to terminate their collective bargaining agreements and cease union negotiations, potentially stripping hundreds of thousands of federal employees of union representation.
A White House fact sheet accompanying the order states that the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which allowed government workers to unionize, “enables hostile Federal unions to obstruct agency management.”
The administration is invoking an arcane provision in the Civil Service Reform Act claiming that collective bargaining rights can be terminated in instances where unions pose a national security threat. The administration’s sudden reliance on this never-before-used rule — coming at the crescendo of open conflict with federal employee unions — suggests the national security justification is merely a convenient pretext for a strong-arm tactic in a broader power struggle against the federal workforce.
This executive order marks a dramatic escalation in the administration’s hostility toward organized labor, reflecting a broader pattern of undermining worker protections. By dismantling decades of labor relations infrastructure overnight, the administration has signaled its contempt for the principle that workers deserve a say in their workplace conditions. The sweeping nature of the order — targeting eighteen departments under the guise of national security — reveals the administration’s true aim: to silence dissent and weaken institutions that challenge presidential power. The administration has made similar national security claims, and likewise reached for arcane anti-immigrant laws, to justify detaining and deporting Palestine solidarity activists.
Union leaders see the move as politically motivated retaliation for standing up to the Trump administration’s attacks on the federal workforce, including aggressive layoffs prompted by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Colin Smalley, president of Local 777 of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) and an organizer with the Federal Unionists Network (FUN), told Jacobin that Trump’s order is “absolutely a brazen political attack on workers.”
“You don’t have to look further than the fact sheet that the White House put out on this, which at the bottom talks about how the president feels slighted by federal unions and is offended by the fact that we assert our rights,” Smalley said. “This isn’t so much about a legitimate exercise of executive power as it is an act of political retribution.”
The language in the White House fact sheet indeed contains confrontational rhetoric, which Smalley describes as “belligerent.” The document claims that “certain Federal unions have declared war on President Trump’s agenda” and describes the largest federal union as “fighting back” against Trump. It also states that “President Trump refuses to let union obstruction interfere with his efforts” and “will not tolerate mass obstruction,” framing the issue as a direct conflict between the president and federal workers.
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), representing 800,000 civil servants, strongly condemned the action, calling it illegal and saying it was preparing legal challenges. AFGE president Everett Kelley called it “a disgraceful and retaliatory attack” on workers “simply because they are members of a union that stands up to [Trump’s] harmful policies.”
AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler also condemned the order, saying it is “the very definition of union-busting.” Shuler characterized Trump’s order as “punishment for unions who are leading the fight against the administration’s illegal actions in court” and a “blatant attempt to silence” workers critical of the Trump administration and unwilling to endure budget cuts and mass layoffs without fighting back
War on the “Deep State”
The executive order represents the latest chapter in Trump’s long-standing conflict with the federal workforce, against which he has long nursed a grudge, considering it part of the “deep state.” As the New York Times reported last November, predicting the assault on the federal workforce that indeed began nearly immediately after Trump retook office, “Few notions have consumed the once and future president more than the belief that his executive power has been constrained by a cabal of unelected bureaucrats.”
Trump began his 2024 election campaign with a rally in Waco, Texas, where he framed the federal bureaucracy as a national adversary, declaring, “Either the deep state destroys America, or we destroy the deep state.” Waco is famously the site of the 1993 siege and deadly standoff between federal agents and the Branch Davidian religious group, an event that became a rallying symbol for anti-government movements and right-wing militia groups that viewed it as federal government overreach and abuse of power.
While the current labor struggle is inflected with Trump’s views about the federal bureaucracy specifically, its implications extend beyond government employment. According to Joseph A. McCartin, director of Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, the current administration’s actions against federal workers could have far-reaching consequences for workers’ rights. “As the nation’s largest employer, the federal government’s labor relations policies inevitably ripple across the economy, influencing how employers of all kinds behave,” McCartin wrote in Dissent magazine last month.
The move echoes President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 firing of over 11,000 striking air traffic controllers, which historians widely view as a turning point that emboldened private sector union busting. Unlike Reagan, who targeted one specific union as a show of force during a strike, Trump’s executive order broadly eliminates collective bargaining rights across many agencies. But the actions are similar, broadcasting a zero-tolerance policy on worker organizing that challenges the president’s authority and sending a clear message to employers that aggressive anti-union tactics have the administration’s blessing.
Smalley points to a power struggle dating back to Trump’s first administration, when the White House frequently clashed with federal unions. “There were a number of things that [Trump and his team] tried to accomplish that were frustrated by the process that’s been established in the federal sector labor relations statute,” Smalley told Jacobin. “The fact that they have to comply with the rules and can’t just do whatever they want really bothered them the first time around. And this time, they are moving to do it anyway.”
The administration is using national security as a pretext, but the scope of its order extends far beyond agencies explicitly concerned with security matters. While it includes the departments of Homeland Security, Defense, State, and Veterans Affairs, it also covers the Treasury Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, and the General Services Administration, among others. It follows a similar directive from the Department of Homeland Security specifically targeting the Transportation Security Administration workers’ union.
Following the termination of collective bargaining agreements, the administration has outlined several immediate changes. These include shortening the timeline for performance improvement plans to no more than thirty days, requiring a swift return to in-person work, and ending government collection of union dues.
Federal Workers Vow to Carry On
While the executive order represents a major setback for federal unions, Smalley notes that workers have faced similar challenges before and have continued to organize effectively. The rights that are currently being stripped were won through decades of struggle.
“Federal workers didn’t have legally recognized collective bargaining rights until the 1970s. It’s been a little less than fifty years that this law has been on the books,” Smalley said. “Prior to that, for more than half a century, federal workers still formed unions, and they still turned to each other to achieve gains in their working conditions through collective action.”
Smalley emphasized that despite the order, organizing efforts will continue. “We’re going to be taking our cues from history,” he told Jacobin. “We’re still going to be just as aggressive in trying to make sure that our agencies are able to deliver for the American public, and we’re going to be just as aggressive in protecting all of the various workplace rights that workers have won over the years.”
While national unions are “focused on the logistics and the legal arguments they’re going to be making in response to this,” Smalley said, the Federal Unionists Network will “be focusing on how we turn our attention to the work of organizing with each other and supporting each other even when the whole terrain of how we assert our rights is shifting.”