Trump order could cripple federal worker unions fighting DOGE cuts

Protesters rally outside of the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, on March 17, 2025. Federal worker unions have sought over the past two months to lead the resistance to President Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency, filing lawsuits, organizing protests and signing up new members by the thousands. (Meridith Kohut/The New York Times)

By Rebecca Davis O’Brien

Federal worker unions have sought over the past two months to lead the resistance to President Donald Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency, filing lawsuits, organizing protests and signing up new members by the thousands.

Last week, Trump struck back with a potentially crippling blow.

In a sweeping executive order denouncing the unions as “hostile” to his agenda, Trump cited national security concerns to remove about 1 million civil servants across more than a dozen agencies from the reach of organized labor, eliminating the unions’ power to represent those workers at the bargaining table or in court.

A lawsuit accompanying the executive order, filed by the administration in federal court in Texas, asks a judge to give Trump permission to rescind collective bargaining agreements, citing national security interests and saying the agreements had “hamstrung” executive authority.

Labor leaders vowed Friday to challenge the Trump actions in court. But, barring a legal intervention, the moves could kneecap federal unions and protections for many civil service employees just as workers brace for a new round of job cuts across the government.

“They are hobbling the union, ripping up collective bargaining agreements, and then they will come for the workers,” said Brian Kelly, a Michigan-based employee of the Environmental Protection Agency who heads a local of the American Federation of Government Employees, the country’s largest federal employee union. “So, it’s a worst-case scenario.”

The move added to the list of actions by Trump to use the levers of the presidency to weaken perceived enemies, in this case seeking to neutralize groups that represent civil servants who make up the “deep state” he is trying to dismantle. In issuing the order, Trump said he was using congressionally granted powers to designate certain sectors of the federal workforce central to “national security missions,” and exempt from collective-bargaining requirements. Employees of some agencies, including the FBI and the CIA, are already excluded from collective bargaining for these reasons.

But, with his order, Trump added exemptions for many workers in the Veterans Affairs, Treasury and Energy departments as well as the EPA, among others. Huge portions of the Department of Health and Human Services were also designated as vital to national security, in addition to “most components” of the Justice Department.

The order was clear in its purpose: to neutralize groups that have been able “to obstruct agency management.”

“The goal is to stop employees in certain security-related agencies from unionizing in ways that disrupt the president’s agenda,” said Harrison Fields, a White House spokesperson.

Since Trump returned to office in January and began imposing large-scale reductions in the government workforce, federal employee unions, and particularly AFGE, have taken on new visibility and a central role in challenging the Trump administration. The unions have scored some successes in court challenging cuts related to the efforts of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Labor leaders have emerged as vocal champions for federal workers — and sharp critics of Trump and Musk.

AFGE has seen a surge of tens of thousands of new dues-paying members since January, union officials said.

Samuel R. Bagenstos, a University of Michigan law professor and former general counsel to the Department of Health and Human Services, said the executive order would be vulnerable to “very significant” legal challenges, calling it “a dramatic overreach of the president’s authority” under laws governing the federal workforce. The effort to justify the move under rules for national security employees is a stretch, Bagenstos said.

“Here we have this incredibly broad effort to take away the power of any union to represent any employee,” Bagenstos said.

Union officials said Friday that they feared the president’s actions could be catastrophic for their organizations on multiple fronts.

They said the cancellation of collective bargaining agreements for many workers would have the immediate effect of ending collection of dues from those workers’ paychecks.

Leaders at AFGE estimated that 75% of their 300,000 dues-paying members use paycheck deductions. Now, the union will have to persuade members to make direct payments online to the union, they said.

What’s more, union leaders said, the president’s actions could deal a lethal blow to their most potent weapon so far against the Trump administration and its DOGE-led cuts: the federal court system.

In the absence of a collective bargaining agreement, the unions would no longer be the representative of workers, which means a judge might find they no longer have legal standing to sue on their behalf, union leaders and lawyers said. Fields said as much Friday: “Because of this litigation, unions impacted by the executive order would no longer be able to represent agency employees.”

Unions said they would fight back. Speaking on Friday at a news conference on Capitol Hill, the president of AFGE, Everett Kelley, called the executive order “plainly retaliatory,” and said: “The labor movement will not be silenced.” Randy Erwin, national president of the National Federation of Federal Employees — another union affected by the order — called it “the biggest assault on collective bargaining rights that we have ever seen in this country,” and called it “blatantly illegal and unconstitutional.”

AFGE’s leadership held an emergency meeting late Thursday to discuss the order. While the union’s leadership has braced for major assaults on the workforce, some leaders did not see such a dramatic move coming, according to one person involved in the discussion.

Other union officials have described preparing for such a moment, given Trump’s efforts during his first administration to diminish the power of federal unions and to remove protections on civil service jobs.

Federal law imposes restrictions on federal employees. Union membership cannot be mandated, for one, and federal employees cannot strike.