Key GOP House Reps Break With Trump’s Bid to Destroy Federal Unions
The bill, according to Rep. Lawler, would reverse a prior Trump executive order that “stripped collective bargaining protections from workers across multiple federal agencies.”
By Bob Hennelly
The lopsided success of the House discharge petition calling for the release of the Epstein files may be grabbing all the headlines—but there’s a second more obscure discharge petition calling for the restoration of federal workers’ union rights that is also a sharp rebuke of President Donald Trump and his efforts to strip one million federal workers of their rights.
The “Protect the American Workforce Act,” which supports the right of federal workers to collectively bargain, has drawn the support of Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), and Rep. Nick Lalota (R-NY). Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME) is leading the discharge effort as well.
The bill, according to Rep. Lawler, would reverse a prior Trump executive order that “stripped collective bargaining protections from workers across multiple federal agencies, including the Departments of Defense, State, Veterans Affairs, Justice, and Energy, as well as certain employees in other key departments."
“Every American deserves the right to have a voice in the workplace, including those who serve their country every single day. Supporting workers and ensuring good government are not opposing ideas. They go hand in hand. Restoring collective bargaining rights strengthens our federal workforce and helps deliver more effective, accountable service to the American people,” Rep. Lawler said in a statement.
“AFGE thanks Congressman Lawler for his courage in compelling a House vote on HR 2550, the Protect America’s Workforce Act, to restore collective bargaining rights across the federal government," said Dr. Everett B. Kelley, National President, American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO (AFGE). “Through the efforts of Congressman Lawler and his 217 like-minded bipartisan colleagues, the full House will get to vote on this critical measure that restores workplace rights first enacted nearly five decades ago.”
Kelley continued, "Collective bargaining gives employees a fundamental voice in making the government work better for the American people, and we thank Congressman Lawler for recognizing that America functions best when labor and management cooperate toward common goals. We urge House passage of the bill and swift approval by the Senate and the President."
“America never voted to eliminate workers’ union rights, and the strong bipartisan support for my bill shows that Congress will not stand idly by while President Trump nullifies federal workers’ collective bargaining agreements and rolls back generations of labor law,” Rep. Golden said in a statement. “I’m grateful to Reps. LaLota and Lawler for bringing this discharge petition over the finish line, and I’m calling on Speaker Mike Johnson to schedule a clean, up-or-down vote on this bill.”
In addition to Reps. Fitzpatrick, LaLota, Lawler, Don Bacon (R-NE) and Robert Bresnahan (R-PA) have also signed the discharge petition.
“The labor movement fought back against the largest act of union-busting in American history by doing what we do best: organizing," AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said in a statement. “Working people built a bipartisan coalition to restore union rights to federal workers in the face of unprecedented attacks on our freedoms. We commend every Democrat and Republican who signed the discharge petition to bring the Protect America’s Workforce Act to a vote, but the fight isn’t over. It’s time to bring the Protect America’s Workforce Act to a vote and restore federal workers’ right to collectively bargain and have a voice on the job.”
Trump's unprecedented drive to dismantle the federal government went well beyond targeting collective bargaining rights, however.
In the last several months, entire agencies have been reduced to shadows of their former footprint, and for the first time in its 61-year history the federal government suspended the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, aka food stamps, upon which 42 million Americans rely, including tens of millions of working Americans, the disabled and children.
Less than a month into Donald Trump’s second presidential term, his full court press to let billionaire Elon Musk dismantle the federal government started with the mass layoffs of tens of thousands of provisional workers in essential job titles in agencies including the FAA and the Veterans Administration. Similarly, Musk’s unilateral shutting down of the US Agency for International and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau raised significant constitutional questions but courts largely deferred to the White House pending the outcome of ongoing litigation.
“This administration has abused the probationary period to conduct a politically driven mass firing spree, targeting employees not because of performance, but because they were hired before Trump took office,” Dr. Everett Kelley, said at the time.
Kelley continued, "These firings are not about poor performance—there is no evidence these employees were anything but dedicated public servants. They are about power. They are about gutting the federal government, silencing workers, and forcing agencies into submission to a radical agenda that prioritizes cronyism over competence.”
Three American Federation of Government Employees unions filed the first lawsuit challenging Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, rightly observing DOGE was not actually a federal agency.
Trump's assault on the federal civil service went well beyond driving out probationary workers with Elon Musk’s mass e-mails to federal civil servants demanding they justify their jobs in a form of unprecedented cyber-bullying designed to destabilize and demoralize a workforce. The harassment coincided with agents of DOGE seeking access and getting it over the objection of career officials to mission critical confidential data for agencies like the U.S. Treasury and the Social Security Administration.
In March, by an executive order, President Trump stripped collective bargaining rights from a million federal workers from a broad swath of federal agencies asserting unspecified national security concerns.
“President Trump's latest executive order is a disgraceful and retaliatory attack on the rights of hundreds of thousands of patriotic American civil servants—nearly one-third of whom are veterans—simply because they are members of a union that stands up to his harmful policies," Dr. Everett Kelley, said. “This administration’s bullying tactics represent a clear threat not just to federal employees and their unions, but to every American who values democracy and the freedoms of speech and association. Trump’s threat to unions and working people across America is clear: fall in line or else.”
AFGE challenged the Trump administration's moves in the courts with decidedly mixed results. Like public workers across the country, federal workers can't go on strike. The national AFL-CIO offered moral, tactical as well as legal support for AFGE and several other federal unions. However, there was not a general strike or transport sector slow-down as might have been anticipated in other parts of the world where there's more cohesion between private and public sector unions.
Historically, the GOP and particularly the MAGA movement, has attracted substantial rank and file union support using racist anti-immigrant and anti-federal government propaganda that's gotten enough traction that President Trump swept rust-belt states in the last election.
The first months of the Trump junta's radical strategy to dismantle the federal civil service was presaged in essential reporting back in October in Government Executive, before the election which described in detail plans publicly circulated by Russell Vought, primary author of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025. Vought served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget for the Trump administration.
"Vought’s preparations for a future Trump administration involve building a 'shadow' Office of Legal Counsel, he told the gathered supporters in May 2023. That office, part of the Justice Department, advises the president on the scope of their powers. Vought made clear he wants the office to help Trump steamroll the kind of internal opposition he faced in his first term."
In April, the New York Times reported that President Trump claimed “expansive and disputed powers, his administration has curbed the influential Office of Legal Counsel as the Government Executive reporting presaged six months earlier even as candidate Trump denied on the 2024 campaign trail any knowledge of Project 2025.
As the Times noted, in Trump's second term, OLC was “largely sidelined” even as Trump pressed policies that pushed the "legal limits" and asserted “an expansive view of his power” which shifted "the balance of legal power in the executive branch toward the White House, speeding up Mr. Trump's ability to act but creating mounting difficulties for the Justice Department lawyers who must defend the government in court.”
Back in October, the Government Executive observed correctly the OLC had historically "operated with a degree of independence."
“If, all of a sudden, the office is full of a bunch of loyalists whose only job is to rubber-stamp the White House’s latest policy directive, whose only goal is to justify the ends by whatever means, that would be quite dangerous,” an attorney who worked in the office under a previous Republican administration told Government Executive.
“Another priority, according to Vought, was to 'defund' certain independent federal agencies and demonize career civil servants, which include scientists and subject matter experts,” Government Executive reported. "Project 2025’s plan to revive Schedule F, an attempt to make it easier to fire a large swath of government workers who currently have civil service protections, aligns with Vought’s vision."
That vision, as reported by ProPublica in October, was described in detail by Vought in private speeches he delivered in 2023 and 2024.
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”
Then came the 43-day federal government shutdown, the longest in history, induced by Trump when the GOP controlled Congress refused to negotiate with Congressional Democrats over the implementation of the so-called "Big Beautiful" budget bill. That bill takes healthcare away from 15 million Americans and sets the stage for massive double-digit price spikes for healthcare premiums for many millions more who relied on the government subsidies established by the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.
Last month, in a controversial move, AFGE's Kelley called for an end to the shutdown, as his members who had to work without pay, entered their second month without a check and had to turn to food pantries to feed their families.
“Both political parties have made their point, and still there is no clear end in sight,” Kelley said in a statement. “It's time to pass a clean continuing resolution and end this shutdown today. No half measures, and no gamesmanship.”
That, no doubt, gave political cover to the several moderate Senators to break with their caucus and vote earlier this month to side with the GOP to vote to end the shutdown.