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By Joe Davidson · The Washington Post (c) 2025
Now we may know why President Donald Trump has not reissued his three first-term, anti-union directives that sharply reduced the ability of labor leaders to represent employees.
Rather than hamstring federal labor organizations, Trump wants to bust the unions.
In another move among many to vastly expand the power of the presidency, Trump issued an executive order last week that is the most aggressive attack on collective bargaining the nation has ever seen. If the action withstands judicial challenges, it will cancel legally binding union contracts covering a large swath of federal employees in many agencies that would no longer recognize union representation.
Trump’s order would eliminate collective bargaining agreements in about three dozen agencies across the government. Although he claims this is necessary under his disputably broad definition of national security, some of the agencies have little to do with that issue. And, employees at intelligence and national security agencies such as the FBI and CIA already are not allowed to unionize.
Notably, the American Academy of Diplomacy, a nonpartisan organization of national security professionals and retired U.S. ambassadors, strongly opposes the order. “Attempting to politicize a professional workforce that has been a faithful and nonpartisan partner of our elected leadership for over 100 years since the establishment of the Foreign Service,” its statement said, “is a profound mistake.”
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) estimated Trump’s order affects 1 million feds. A statement from the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), which filed a lawsuit against the government’s move, said Trump would eliminate “union rights for two-thirds of the entire federal workforce,” which totals about 2.3 million civilian workers.
“It is by far the largest single action of union-busting in American history,” said Joseph A. McCartin, a Georgetown University history professor and president of the Labor and Working-Class History Association.
Trump’s current aggression against federal unions goes well beyond his May 2018 benchmark of three executive orders. They were revoked by President Joe Biden, but not before the directives impeded federal grievance procedures, quickened the firing process, expelled labor leaders from agency-provided office space, and severely cut their government-paid “official time” when representing unions in agency matters.
This year’s order reflects a Trump administration that is much better prepared than his first for a more thorough, systematic and deeper attack on organized labor and the government generally.
A key part of this is his Justice Department’s brazen ploy for a potentially friendly jurist to preemptively affirm the directive, even before a court challenge was lodged against it. Despite the White House’s earlier criticism of “forum-shopping,” Justice asked a Waco, Texas, federal court to confirm Trump’s power to kill union contracts. The Waco court has just one district judge, chosen by Trump, leaving no doubt who will hear the case. The DOJ filed a similar preemptive action against the NTEU in Kentucky. The department and the White House did not respond to questions about the executive order or court venues.
Federal law allows presidents to exclude agencies from collective bargaining if their “primary function” is investigative or national security work. Trump’s order “appears illegitimate on its face” for certain agencies, said Debra D’Agostino, a Federal Practice Group law firm partner. “While this makes sense” for national security agencies, she said, “it gets ridiculous” when applied to organizations like the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The NTEU’s lawsuit argues that when passing the law, “Congress’s explicit finding” was, quoting the law, “‘the statutory protection of the right of employees to organize, bargain collectively, and participate through labor organizations of their own choosing in decisions which affect them … safeguards the public interest.’” The American Foreign Service Association also condemned the directive.
Trump’s order does not mention the Department of Housing and Urban Development, but, curiously, the DOJ’s legal brief cites HUD among the agencies included. The justification for excluding HUD from collective bargaining, according to Justice, is HUD uses computers and “cybersecurity is national security” because foreign adversaries “are constantly seeking to penetrate agency computer systems.”
That claim could apply to every government office, no matter the function.
Beyond any national security arguments, central to the order is Trump’s intention to emasculate union power.
Collective bargaining agreements (CBAs), Justice argued, “give hostile unions powerful tools to prevent changes to agency operations they oppose,” adding that the union contracts prevent “agencies from adopting personnel policies that align with the President’s priorities.”
The DOJ’s brief said “the Court should declare … agencies do have the power and authority under the Executive Order to rescind or repudiate” their labor contracts. “And once repudiation is accomplished,” the filing continued, “agencies will no longer be bound by the terms of the CBAs … agencies will no longer have a duty to engage in collective bargaining with certain of their employees, and [unions] can no longer represent the employees in collective bargaining.”
Unions are doing their jobs by opposing the brutal way Trump has been dumping federal employees, placing thousands on leave with little or no notice, locking them out of offices and closing some agencies without congressional approval. Justice acknowledges that under current law, “agencies could not implement unilateral changes without seeking preclearance from union representatives.”
But rather than seek legislation to change the law, the Trump administration is going to great lengths to defy legal contracts. Filing its case for approval of Trump’s defiance in Waco means the case against the AFGE, the largest federal union, will be heard by his judicial pick, Judge Alan Albright, more than 1,200 miles from Washington, where both the agencies and the union are headquartered. Albright drew national attention in a 2021 court-shopping controversy because of the unusually large number of patent cases that came before him.
The DOJ’s court action “is incredibly aggressive, especially given that the suit is not in fact alleging that the unions have violated any laws,” said Michelle Bercovici, a federal employment partner with the Alden Law Group. “It appears to me that the administration is blatantly engaging in forum shopping by filing this appeal in a small, conservative district court with a sole Trump-appointed federal judge.”
Not all conservatives agree with Trump’s actions.
In a rare display of GOP pushback against him, a letter from eight Republican House members urged Trump to reconsider his directive and restore collective bargaining in agencies where it “would not genuinely impair national security interests.”
“Overly broad actions,” they warned, risk “creating instability and resistance rather than enhancing performance.”
