Assessing Donald Trump’s Federal Workers Union Bloodbath
Until this past year, one had to go back a century or more in U.S. history to find instances where hundreds of thousands of workers were suddenly and decisively stripped of their ability to bargain collectively. It happened in 1919, when a nascent union movement among over 400,000 striking steel workers was crushed amid the Red Scare. It happened again in 1922, when a similar number of railroad shop-men saw their unions suffer a similarly staggering defeat when the nation’s railroads broke their nationwide walkout with federal government support.
In no sector of the United States since the 1920s were unions so thoroughly undercut by an employer offensive over such a brief span of time as they were in the federal sector in 2025.
Future historians may well regard what happened to U.S. federal workers and unions last year as every bit as impactful as those early twentieth-century reversals. In no sector since the 1920s were unions so thoroughly undercut and employment relations so completely upended by an employer offensive over such a brief span of time as they were in the federal sector in 2025. It took a half-century for union density in the building trades to decline from just over 40 percent in 1973 to just over 10 percent in 2023, and for manufacturing union density to drop from over 35 percent to under 10 percent. By contrast, the largest federal union, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), saw approximately 600,000 of the 800,000 workers they represented summarily stripped of their rights to union representation within months of Donald Trump taking office in January 2025. The fierce velocity of the rollback of collective bargaining in the federal sector has no equal in the post-New Deal era.
Yet both the immensity and the implications of what occurred in 2025 are difficult to gauge at this point. Some legal cases that will impact the extent of the losses are still winding their way through the courts, and we need to see how they play out before a full and accurate accounting of labor’s losses can be registered. Nor has labor seemed interested in analyzing the losses while the battle is still unfolding. Although they are hobbled, federal unions are fighting on, and their leaders would prefer to look ahead toward court cases that have yet to be resolved or to focus on the hope that a Congress recomposed by the 2026 midterms might restore much of what has been lost. That is a mistake. Before unions can chart a viable way forward, it is essential that they first assess what has happened and why.
A Stunning Onslaught
Donald Trump’s administration did not set out only to bust federal unions by stripping federal workers of their right to bargain collectively. It sought to change the entire nature of federal employment that allowed unions to grow in the federal service in the first place.
The system that Trump set out to destroy had been constructed over the course of decades, and it rested on two key pillars. The oldest of these pillars was the civil service, which dated back to the Pendleton Act of 1883. This legislation sought to depoliticize government work by breaking with the “spoils system” that had long made government employment contingent on partisan loyalties. The evolution of the civil service system over time placed federal workers in an anomalous employment status in comparison with the nation’s private sector workers: they were not simply at-will employees who could be fired for any reason or no reason at all.
[The OMB director] promised that if returned to office, the Trump administration would put federal workers “in trauma.”
The second pillar was the right to a limited form of collective bargaining, introduced by John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order (EO) 10988 in 1962. Under that system, federal employees had a right to form unions and to bargain collectively. But they could not bargain over their pay and benefits, which were subject to Congress’s oversight, and had no right to strike or engage in other forms of collective action. These restrictions notwithstanding, the order was broad in application, excluding only the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and employees at any other agency who were designated by their agency head to be primarily performing “intelligence, investigative, or security” work.1 Kennedy’s executive order not only facilitated the growth of unions in the federal service, it encouraged states to pass laws allowing state and local workers to unionize.
In 1978, the bipartisan Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA) connected the two pillars of civil service and collective bargaining in a unified structure under the aegis of new agencies: the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which administered the civil service system; the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA), which oversaw union rights and collective bargaining; and the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), which heard federal employees’ appeals of adverse actions. Since it was codified in law, that system had withstood previous crises, from the 1981 strike of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) to Trump’s efforts to weaken union rights through three May 2018 executive orders during his first term and introduction of a new Schedule F into the federal service by executive order in October 2020, which would allow him to define a broad swath of jobs that influence federal policy as outside civil service guidelines. An injunction issued by then-federal judge Ketanji Brown Jackson blunted implementation of the union-related executive orders, while the bid to create a Schedule F designation in the waning days of Trump’s first administration quickly became a dead letter. All of Trump’s executive orders were quickly reversed by the Biden administration.
Trump and his allies were determined that, should they regain power, they would move aggressively to take on both federal unions and the entire structure of federal employment relations as it was set up by the CSRA. A chapter in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 cowritten by Donald Devine, Ronald Reagan’s OPM director, called for a large-scale overhaul of the federal service and suggested that it was “hard to avoid the . . . conclusion” that government workers’ “unions were not compatible with constitutional government.”2 Meanwhile, Russell Vought, who as Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director in the last months of Trump’s first term pushed for the creation of Schedule F, co-authored Project 2025. In private speeches ahead of the election, Vought promised that if returned to office, the Trump administration would put federal workers “in trauma.”3
When Trump took office, they were ready to seize the day. Hours after taking the oath of office, Trump signed a slew of executive orders meant to remake government employment. Among other things, those orders re-introduced Schedule F,4 established an entity called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and gave it authority to review almost all federal agencies and their personnel,5 instituted hiring criteria to prevent the employment of individuals who would not “faithfully serve the Executive Branch,”6 and more.7 Probationary hires in multiple agencies were immediately dismissed. The “trauma” promised by Russell Vought, who returned to his post as director of OMB, was felt immediately.
Executive Order 14251 stripped approximately one million federal workers of their rights to join a union and bargain collectively.
Under Elon Musk’s leadership, DOGE operatives were given free rein to rummage through agencies’ payrolls and force or cajole over 300,000 employees out of their federal jobs.8 The campaign to get federal workers to simply quit began on January 28, 2025, when DOGE sent out the first “Fork in the Road” email to federal workers. “If you choose not to continue in your current role in the federal workforce,” it advised, “Type the word ‘Resign’ into the body of this reply email.”9 During the next two months, Musk and DOGE ran rampant. On February 3, 2025, Musk tweeted, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the woodchipper. Could [have] gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”10 On February 22, 2025, he tweeted, “Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”11 Although the weekly reporting system soon broke down, it sent the desired signal: everyone was potentially under surveillance and subject to dismissal.
The most vulnerable federal workers turned out to be Black women and employees connected to civil rights or Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) initiatives. Black women, who made up 12 percent of the federal workforce (twice their proportion of private sector employment), were disproportionately affected by federal workforce reductions. Meanwhile, anything perceived to benefit Black workers seemed under attack. The Social Security Administration shuttered the office where 150 employees had handled civil rights complaints. And the FBI instructed janitorial staff at its Quantico, Virginia, facility “to paint over a colorful mural bearing the words ‘FAIRNESS,’ ‘COMPASSION’ and ‘DIVERSITY.’”12
Many of the initial DOGE-driven firings and fork-in-the-road buyouts were hasty and unplanned. The Energy Department had to rehire engineers who maintained the nuclear arsenal; the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) had to rehire staffers at the Veterans Crisis Hotline; and Health and Human Services had to rehire the neonatologist who oversees infant formula quality. Nonetheless, the campaign instilled fear among many federal workers that their civil service jobs were not secure.13
Meanwhile the administration moved to take control of and disable the two agencies that upheld workers’ rights to union representation and appeal of adverse actions, removing both FLRA chair Susan Tsui Grundmann14 and MSPB chair Cathy Harris15 from their offices. In the words of one federal judge, their effective decapitation left these agencies “functionally impaired.”16 Having broken the agencies that protected federal workers, Trump’s appointees began to disregard collective bargaining agreements. At the same time, Trump’s OPM added what are in effect loyalty oaths to the application process for a job in a federal agency, a question that asks applicants to submit an essay on which of the Trump administration’s “Executive Orders and policy priorities” they support and how they “would help implement them if hired.”
Donald Trump accomplished the largest individual episode of union busting in U.S. history.
The coup de grace was delivered on March 27, 2025, when Trump signed EO 14251. This order stripped collective bargaining rights from two-thirds of federal workers who previously enjoyed them on national security grounds.17 While the 1962 Kennedy EO 10988 and the 1978 CSRA had both recognized the right of the president to exclude some federal workers from collective bargaining rights on national security grounds, such exclusions had always been construed narrowly over the years. Efforts to expand exclusions—such as George W. Bush’s attempted exclusion of Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workers—ultimately failed. The Trump administration blew the exclusion loophole wide open, insisting federal employees, from the Bureau of Land Management to the Food Safety and Inspection Service to the Food and Drug Administration, no longer had union and collective bargaining rights.
The fact sheet the White House issued to explain EO 14251 made the administration’s true motivation crystal clear. It accused unions of having “declared war on President Trump’s agenda.” One of the examples it cited was the fact that the union representing VA workers had filed “seventy national and local grievances over President Trump’s policies since the inauguration.”18
That the Trump administration would take an aggressive approach to federal unions was scarcely a surprise . . . Nonetheless, federal unions were ill-prepared.
EO 14251 stripped approximately one million federal workers of their rights to join a union and bargain collectively. An astonishing 600,000 of the 800,000 federal workers represented by the federal government’s largest union, AFGE, lost their union rights under the order. Although the Supreme Court has yet to rule on the right of the president to execute such an extraordinary move, this has scarcely deterred the administration from plunging ahead. Many agencies abrogated their collective bargaining and union dues check-off agreements, sending some unions into a financial tailspin before temporary injunctions began to slow implementation. By May 2025, AFGE cut its national staff almost in half.19
Donald Trump accomplished the largest individual episode of union busting in U.S. history. In a matter of months, he had not only dealt the union movement one of the most serious blows it had sustained in a century, but he also shredded the legal and institutional protections that workers had won over the course of decades and begun remaking the employment terms offered by the nation’s largest employer, the federal government.
Feeble Union Resistance
Facing this stunning onslaught, the labor movement was caught flatfooted. That the Trump administration would take an aggressive approach to federal unions was scarcely a surprise. Project 2025 and Vought had signaled their intentions months before 2024’s election. Nonetheless, federal unions were ill-prepared.
Their lack of preparation was due in part to the fact that federal unions have historically struggled with a free-rider problem. They exist in a “right-to-work” setting in which unions have no right to negotiate union- or agency-shop provisions in their contracts that would allow unions to collect fees from the workers they represent in collective bargaining or grievance processes. As the Trump administration took office, some unions, such as the National Association of Air Traffic Controllers (NATCA), which boasted over 19,000 dues-payers (well over 90 percent of the workers it represents) were on strong financial footing with a strong internal union culture. But such density was atypical. The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), which counted roughly 93,000 dues-payers among the roughly 150,000 federal workers it represented, was closer to the norm. And the largest union in the federal service, AFGE, was among its weakest in terms of paying members. As Trump took office, the union struggled to get its dues-paying membership up to 325,000 of the 800,000 workers they represented. The uneven degree of organization among federal unions was compounded by a sense of caution among federal workers, who had little experience with protest and had never been trained by their unions to engage in collective action under emergency circumstances.
Nonetheless, there was one group of federal workers who strove mightily to prepare for a second the Trump administration: the Federal Unionists Network (FUN).
The origins of this group can be traced back to the federal shutdown of 2018-2019. As I reported in this journal after that affair (see “Is a Sleeping Giant Beginning to Stir? Federal Workers’ Unions and the Shutdown,” New Labor Forum, Volume 28, Issue 3), as the shutdown dragged on, it began to energize sporadic grassroots resistance from federal workers in some locations. One of those places was New York City, where Chris Dols, an Army Corps of Engineers employee, was elected to a leadership position in the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) Local 98. During the shutdown, Dols and his colleagues began meeting with members of an AFGE local that represented furloughed Environmental Protection Agency workers. Out of their collaborations emerged New York City Federal Workers United (NYCFWU).
Federal sector union leaders viewed FUN with ambivalence, as a potential source of internal challenges to union leadership as much as a potential organizing center . . .
In January 2019, the New York activists launched a website and Facebook page and announced a goal of “building federal worker power to improve our working conditions and resist austerity for ourselves and the people we serve across the country.” On their website, NYCFWU posted a prominent op-ed co-authored by well-known activist Barbara Ehrenreich that advocated a strike by federal workers. “If we want to end this shutdown, we need to turn up the pressure,” their website explained. This call to “turn up the pressure” proved prophetic, for the shutdown was finally halted when enough air traffic controllers called in sick on the morning of Friday, January 25, 2019, to cause the Federal Aviation Administration to issue a ground stop at major East Coast airports.20
The lessons Dols and others drew from the 2018-2019 shutdown was that workers needed to get better organized across the federal sector and develop their capacity to resist, to “turn up the pressure.” In efforts to push the Biden administration to do more for federal workers, Dols made contacts with activists in other federal union locals, including Mark Smith, a patient educator at the VA Medical Center in San Francisco who led his National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE) local and thought as Dols did. When it became clear by early 2024 that Trump’s return to office was not only possible but likely, this informal network of federal union activists formalized itself. On April 20, 2024, during the Labor Notes conference in Chicago, FUN held its first open event.21
During the next eight months, the FUN network slowly expanded. Once Trump was elected, its challenge became clear. The organization held its first national Zoom call on December 16, 2024. There was a sense of enthusiasm and determination among the hundreds on that call. They understood that Trump had placed a bull’s-eye on their unions.
Yet in the months that followed, it became clear that federal sector union leaders viewed FUN with ambivalence, as a potential source of internal challenges to union leadership as much as a potential organizing center that could galvanize federal workers across multiple unions to stand together in resistance to Trump. A week after Trump’s order stripping unions of their bargaining rights, I suggested that an unintended consequence of his radical move might be to “rouse the union movement and its allies to a more confrontational opposition to his agenda than anyone could have foreseen only two weeks ago.”22 A more confrontational opposition never emerged. Lacking the strong backing of national union leaders, FUN’s impact was limited. While the network organized multiple protests against the depredations of DOGE and EO 14251 during spring 2025, it was overwhelmed by the scale of Trump’s attack.
While many unions strongly condemned Trump’s actions, none advocated collective action or civil disobedience in defense of federal workers and their union rights.
Failing to embrace FUN’s more confrontational approach, federal union leaders relied primarily on lawsuits, lobbying, and appeals for public sympathy as their very right to existence was being undermined. Not only was the unions’ reliance on traditional tactics inadequate to the struggle at hand, but their refusal to become more confrontational belied their assertion that Trump’s assault was as lawless and dangerous as they insisted it was. At one rally in Baltimore which I attended in May 2025, a lawyer for one federal union laid out the full range of what Trump was doing to destroy his union and trash federal agencies. Then he reassured that the union was “doing what unions do” to fight back. “What do unions do?” he asked rhetorically. “We file things. We file lawsuits. We file grievances. And we are filing reams of them.” Those filings proved fruitless when it came to retaining the unions’ rights to bargain. Yet the unions filed on.
Yet all the blame for labor’s weak response to Trump’s assault on union rights should not be laid at the feet of federal union leaders. The broader labor movement was no more willing to move beyond lawsuits and lobbying. While many unions strongly condemned Trump’s actions, none advocated collective action or civil disobedience in defense of federal workers and their union rights.
This reluctance represented a clear renunciation of strategies labor had used in the past, since confrontation and civil disobedience played a crucial role in the establishment of public-sector unionism in the first place. Strikes at Cape Canaveral had helped spur John F. Kennedy toward EO 10988. Transit union leader Mike Quill’s decision to go to jail in 1966 in defiance of a judicial injunction—“The judge can drop dead in his black robe!” Quill thundered—helped do away with New York State’s 1947 Condon-Wadlin Act, which called for firing state and municipal workers who engaged in a strike. Postal workers’ 1970 illegal national wildcat strike won creation of the U.S. Postal Service, which gave them full collective bargaining rights. Air traffic controllers’ illegal sickout that same year laid the basis for the establishment of PATCO as one of the strongest federal unions of its time.
The renunciation of militancy is understandable given what happened to PATCO in 1981, when it staged a foolhardy all-or-nothing illegal walkout against Ronald Reagan. PATCO’s strike not only broke their union, it also helped ignite a wave of 1980s strikebreaking from which unions never fully recovered. Yet the circumstances of the PATCO strike, in which a federal union staged an illegal walkout against a popular president with demands that the public viewed as selfish, differed radically from the situation labor faced in 2025. Nonetheless, labor’s risk-averse leadership preferred to stand pat and put its faith in the courts and the 2026 midterm elections. No one imitated Mike Quill and went to jail in resistance to Trump’s actions against federal unions.23
An Anticlimactic Denouement
Having failed to aggressively stand up to Trump’s attack on federal unions, it seemed dubious that organized labor would stick together to support their Democratic allies’ efforts to shut down the government beginning on October 1, 2025. The Democrats’ framing of their shutdown did not help. Rather than using it as a vehicle to protest Trump’s lawlessness and increasingly authoritarian governing, which might have made it easier to enlist federal workers in the fight, Democrats focused only on reversing the scheduled expiration of federal subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, which threatened to cause health insurance premiums to spike for 22 million people, throwing many off insurance entirely.
Despite its narrow framing, a good deal of support for the shutdown emerged among federal workers. FUN did its part, delivering a letter to Democratic leaders on September 29, 2025, signed by 35 federal union locals endorsing the shutdown. “Federal workers and the communities we serve will face severe hardship,” the letter acknowledged. “But federal workers will willingly forego paychecks in the hopes of preserving the programs we have devoted our lives to administering.”24 Although their own direct concerns were not addressed in the Democrats’ shutdown demands, many rank-and-file workers who were furloughed or who labored without pay nonetheless agreed with the sentiments in that letter.
Some observers, remembering the 2019 shutdown, predicted that Trump would again knuckle under in the 2025 shutdown. Former labor secretary Robert B. Reich stated, “This shutdown will end sooner than the last one. Air traffic controllers will ensure it does. Within the next few weeks, a few will call in sick. Then the flight delays will cascade.”25 Yet Reich failed to appreciate how much Trump’s attacks had placed federal unions and their members on the defensive. The anticipated sickouts by air traffic controllers and TSA agents that many believed would snarl air travel and force the administration to give in never materialized.
Instead, labor solidarity, not Trump’s resolve, was the first to crack. On October 27, 2025, just when some observers believed the Democrats were close to forcing Trump into concessions, AFGE, both the largest federal union and the one most weakened by Trump’s union busting, broke with the Democrats. Calling the shutdown “an avoidable crisis,” AFGE president Everett Kelley demanded its immediate termination.26 In a closed-door meeting of the AFL-CIO Executive Council, Kelley denounced FUN’s continued support for the shutdown’s basic demands.27 AFGE’s defection effectively doomed the Democrats’ effort. On November 12, 2025, the longest shutdown in U.S. history came to an end, leaving federal workers, their unions, and the Democrats little if anything to show for it.
The Uncertain Road Ahead
Still, some believed they could see a glimmer of hope on the horizon as 2025 ended. After witnessing Democratic landslides in the off-year elections in Virginia and New Jersey and watching Trump’s poll numbers sag, a group of moderate House Republicans broke with their leaders and signed a petition to bring the Protect America’s Workforce Act to a floor vote. The bill voided Trump’s EO 14251 that stripped federal workers of their bargaining rights. It passed the House on December 11, 2025, with a bipartisan 231-195 majority.28 There was little chance that bill would come to a vote in the Senate or could pass a vote there if it did, and no chance that Congress could override Donald Trump’s certain veto if both houses ever did pass it. Nonetheless, Everett Kelley called it a “seismic victory.”29
It is more likely that future historians will view the growth of FUN from a tight-knit group of only 200 or so activists on the eve of Trump’s election to a network of over 20,000 (including nearly 300 local union officials) by the end of 2025 as a more significant development than that throw-away House vote. Only time will tell.30
Indeed, the full costs and broader implications of Trump’s attack on federal unions’ will not be known for some time. Court orders stayed implementation of EO 14251 in several agencies. In part for this reason, many federal workers were still categorized as covered by union contracts months after Trump’s order. This helps explain why U.S. union membership overall not only held steady in 2025, but actually ticked up slightly, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.31
It would be surprising if the brutal blows absorbed by federal workers and unions did not weaken organized labor overall . . .
There is also still a chance that court decisions will further delay or mitigate some of labor’s losses.32 Yet prospects for the long term look dim. On February 26, 2026, a panel of the Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals lifted a temporary restraining order that had held up implementation of Trump’s order covering 800,000 workers. Within days the Internal Revenue Service and the National Institutes of Health were among the agencies that announced they were suspending union recognition and voiding collective bargaining agreements.33
Even if the Supreme Court ultimately rules that Trump exceeded his authority by stripping most federal workers of their union rights, it is likely to yield no more than a Pyrrhic moral victory for unions like the one they achieved regarding the dismissal of probationary federal employees. On September 12, 2025, U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup ruled that OPM had exceeded its authority by firing 25,000 probationaries and yet concluded nonetheless that “too much water has now passed under the bridge” to call for their reinstatement. He recommended that the workers unlawfully fired simply move on with their lives.34 Everett Kelley of AFGE called that decision “another significant victory for federal employees and for all Americans.”35
Hopefully what happened to federal workers in 2025 will not ripple deeply through the labor movement as the PATCO debacle did in the 1980s. Nonetheless, it would be surprising if the brutal blows absorbed by federal workers and unions did not weaken organized labor overall with union density already at low ebb, new threats like artificial intelligence looming, and democracy threatened by the authoritarian bent of the present administration.
Whether the assault on federal unions becomes a harbinger of future losses will depend in significant part on what lessons labor draws from it. At this point, one lesson seems clear: fighting to merely restore what was lost in 2025 is not enough. Now that we have witnessed how easily federal workers’ unions could be undermined and their rights swept aside under the old system, it is time that labor started thinking about an entirely new approach.
Notes
1. “Executive Order 10988, Employee-management Cooperation in the Federal Service,” January 17, 1962, available at https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/executive-order-10988-employee-management-cooperation-the-federal-service.
2. Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise: Project 2025, edited by Paul Dans and Steven Groves (Washington, DC: The Heritage Foundation, 2023), available at https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf, 82.
3. Molly Redden, Andy Kroll, and Nick Surgey, “‘Put Them in Trauma’: Inside a Key MAGA Leader’s Plans for a New Trump Agenda,” ProPublica, October 28, 2024, available at https://www.propublica.org/article/video-donald-trump-russ-vought-center-renewing-america-maga.
4. “Restoring Accountability to Policy-influencing Positions within the Federal Workforce,” Federal Register, January 31, 2025, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/31/2025-02095/restoring-accountability-to-policy-influencing-positions-within-the-federal-workforce.
5. “Establishing and Implementing the President’s Department of Government Efficiency,” Federal Register, January 29, 2025, available at https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/29/2025-02005/establishing-and-implementing-the-presidents-department-of-government-efficiency.
6. “Reforming the Federal Hiring Process,” Federal Register, January 30, 2025, available at https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/30/2025-02094/reforming-the-federal-hiring-process-and-restoring-merit-to-government-service.
7. “2025 President Donald J. Trump Executive Orders,” Federal Register, available at https://www.federalregister.gov/presidential-documents/executive-orders/donald-trump/2025.
8. Hannah Natanson and Meryl Kornfield “The Year Trump Broke the Federal Government,” Washington Post, December 21, 2025, available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2025/trump-federal-government-workers-doge/?itid=sr_1_1b5768fd-407a-4243-84fe-3b1dd1312a56.
9. “Deferred Resignation Email to Federal Employees,” U.S. Office of Personnel Management, January 28, 2025, available at https://www.opm.gov/about-us/fork/original-email-to-employees/.
10. Tweet from @elonmusk, February 3, 2025, available at https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1886307316804263979.
11. Tweet from @elonmusk, February 22, 2025, available at https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1893386883444437415.
12. Natanson and Kornfield “The Year Trump Broke the Federal Government.”
13. Natanson and Kornfield “The Year Trump Broke the Federal Government.”
14. Erich Wagner, “Trump Apparently Fires FLRA Chairwoman,” Government Executive, February 11, 2025, available at https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2025/02/trump-apparently-fires-flra-chairwoman/402933/.
15. Ella Lee, “Appeals Panel Clears Path for Trump Firings of MSPB, NLRB Leaders,” The Hill, March 28, 2025, available at https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5220511-trump-firings-nlrb-mspb-appeals-panel/.
16. Jared Serbu, “Are FLRA, OSC, MSPB ‘Functionally Impaired’?” Federal News Network, September 23, 2025, available at https://federalnewsnetwork.com/federal-report/2025/09/are-flra-osc-mspb-functionally-impaired/.
17. “Exclusions from Federal Labor-Management Relations Program,” April 3, 2025, available at https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/04/03/2025-05836/exclusions-from-federal-labor-management-relations-programs.
18. “Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Exempts Agencies with National Security Missions from Federal Collective Bargaining Requirements,” The White House, March 27, 2025, available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/03/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-exempts-agencies-with-national-security-missions-from-federal-collective-bargaining-requirements/.
19. Ryan J. Foley, “Largest Federal Employee Union, a Leading Trump Opponent, to lay off More than Half of Staff,” AP News, April 24, 2025, available at https://apnews.com/article/afge-federal-union-trump-cuts-layoffs-downsizing-53c0a1491cc5af65278fbd16b8cfb6b5.
20. Joseph A. McCartin, “Is a Sleeping Giant Beginning to Stir? Federal Workers Unions and the Government Shutdown,” New Labor Forum 28, no. 3 (Fall 2019): 62-69.
21. Joe DeManuelle-Hall, “Federal Workers Organize,” Labor Notes, February 2025, available at https://labornotes.org/2025/02/federal-workers-organize-against-billionaire-power-grab.
22. Joseph A. McCartin, “Will Federal Workers Rediscover Their Militancy?” Dissent 72, no. 2 (Spring 2025): 89.
23. It was not that leaders lacked experience in civil disobedience. During the 2019 shutdown, when the stakes were lower, several were arrested for engaging in a sit-in on Capitol Hill. See “NFFE President Erwin Arrested,” available at https://nffe.org/press-release/nffe-president-erwin-arrested-alongside-federal-labor-leaders-and-furloughed-federal-employees-following-occupy-hart-protest/.
24. “The Federal Unionists Network and 35 Sponsoring Unions to Minority Leaders Shumer and Jeffries,” September 23, 2025, available at https://storage.googleapis.com/fun-338-public/website/documents/Final-Schumer-Jeffries-shutdown-letter.pdf.
25. Robert Reich, “How the Shutdown Ends,” October 3, 2025, available at https://robertreich.substack.com/p/how-the-shutdown-ends.
26. Everett Kelley, “It’s Past Time to End this Shutdown,” October 27, 2025, available at https://www.afge.org/article/its-past-time-to-end-this-shutdown/.
27. Dan Kaufman, “‘The Biggest Act of Union-Busting in U.S. History’: Trump’s War on Federal Workers,” New York Times Magazine, January 27, 2026, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/magazine/trump-federal-workers-labor-unions.html.
28. Maeve Sheehey, “House Votes to Void Order on Federal Worker Union Rights,” Bloomberg Government, December 11, 2025, available at https://news.bgov.com/bloomberg-government-news/house-votes-to-override-trump-on-federal-worker-union-rights.
29. “Move to Restore Federal Workers’ Union Rights Turns to Senate Following House Victory,” AFGE, December 15, 2025, available at https://www.afge.org/article/move-to-restore-federal-workers-union-rights-turns-to-senate-following-house-victory/.
30. Kaufman, “The Biggest Act of Union-Busting in U.S. History.”
31. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Union Members Summary,” February 18, 2026, available at https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.t03.htm.
32. “Summary of Lawsuits against Trump,” AFGE, December 22, 2025, available at https://www.afge.org/article/summary-of-afge-lawsuits-against-trump–how-litigation-works-2/.
33. American Federation of Government Employees et al. v. Trump, No. 25-4014 D.C. No. 3:25-cv-03070-JD, February 26, 2026, available at https://tinyurl.com/2uyhsdvx; Jory Heckman, “IRS Rescinds Collective Bargaining Agreement with its Largest Union,” Federal News Network, February 27, 2026, available at https://federalnewsnetwork.com/unions/2026/02/irs-rescinds-its-collective-bargaining-agreement-with-nteu/; Margaret Manto, “NIH Says It Will No Longer Recognize the Research Fellows’ Union,” NOTUS, February 4, 2026, available at https://www.notus.org/health-science/nih-says-it-will-no-longer-recognize-research-fellow-union.
34. American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO et al. v. United States Office of Personnel Management, September 12, 2025, 36, available at https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.444883/gov.uscourts.cand.444883.261.0.pdf.
35. “Judge Rules Mass Termination of Probationary Federal Workers Illegal,” AFGE, September 15, 2025, https://www.afge.org/article/judge-rules-mass-termination-of-probationary-federal-workers-illegal/.
Author Biography
Joseph A. McCartin is Professor of History and Founding Executive Director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University. He is the author or editor of numerous books, articles, and reviews on U.S. labor history, including Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America (Oxford University Press, 2011), and most recently, Labor in America: A History, 10th edition (Wiley-Blackwell, 2024), co-authored with Melvyn Dubofsky. He is immediate past president of the Labor and Working-Class History Association.
