Trump claims the right to ban 700k federal workers from having union representation

President Donald Trump eliminated legal rights to collective bargaining from hundreds of thousands of federal workers in a late Thursday night edict, marking the greatest setback for unionized federal workers so far in his second term.

The White House says the executive order comes as “certain federal unions have declared war on President Trump’s agenda,” singling out labor organizations’ legal fights against the Department of Government Efficiency’s potentially illegal mass firings. It relies on a “national security” exemption in the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, a law meant to protect workers’ rights to organize.

The president fired members of the National Labor Relations Board to deny a quorum and prevent any nationwide labor enforcement earlier this year, ended the TSA’s collective bargaining power and said he would break a strike by firing union workers on the campaign trail. But the Thursday decree is the single biggest union-busting order in American history.

“Roughly 700,000 union workers” at the Departments of Defense, Energy, Health and Human Services, State, Treasury, Veterans Affairs, and more are targetted by the order, Eric Blanc, a professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, said in a post on Bluesky.

The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal government labor union, condemned the move and promised to fight the administration’s “threat to unions and working people” in a Thursday statement.

“These threats will not work. Americans will not be intimidated or silenced. AFGE isn't going anywhere,” AFGE President Everett Kelley said. “AFGE is preparing immediate legal action and will fight relentlessly to protect our rights, our members, and all working Americans from these unprecedented attacks.”

The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, another massive labor union representing federal workers, called the attempt illegal in its own statement.

“This attack is meant to silence [federal workers’] voices, so Elon Musk and his minions can shred the services that working people depend on the federal government to do,” AFSCME President Lee Saunders said in the statement. “The billionaires running this administration have proven that they are willing to bulldoze anything that stands in their way to enact their anti-worker, extremist agenda.”