Trump Seeks Rule Changes to Ease Firing Federal Workers and Break Unions
“The Trump administration is attempting to unravel nearly 50 years of established precedent that has functioned well for both federal workers, agencies, and American taxpayers as part of a coordinated campaign targeting federal workers and their rights.” —AFGE National President Everett Kelley
By Steve Wishnia
Trying to protect federal workers’ rights under Donald Trump’s rule has been a one-battle-after-another scenario—and this month, it’s happening on three fronts.
On July 2, the federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Merit Systems Protection Board proposed new regulations, under the title “Promoting Employee Accountability,” that would make it much easier for agencies to fire workers and much more difficult for workers to have union representation in disciplinary proceedings.
That same day, a coalition led by the American Federation of Government Employees [AFGE] and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees [AFSCME] filed a petition in federal court to stop a Department of Agriculture reorganization they say is “forcing office relocations and mass resignations” and is illegal because it was rejected by Congress.
And on July 20, a group of 24 AFGE and National Federation of Federal Employees [NFFE] locals asked a federal court in Maryland to block Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s April 9 order terminating almost all union contracts by a two-paragraph fiat.
“The Trump administration is attempting to unravel nearly 50 years of established precedent that has functioned well for both federal workers, agencies, and American taxpayers as part of a coordinated campaign targeting federal workers and their rights,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said in a statement about the proposed rules.
The proposals would give “political appointees at agencies more ability to fire people,” an AFGE staff attorney told Work-Bites, “no matter what value the employee brings to the agency.”
They are important because working conditions and discipline are the main area where federal workers’ unions have power, as Congress sets their pay and benefits. One change would reduce the time for “Performance Improvement Plans,” in which a worker who’s been formally warned gets a chance to show they’ve improved enough to keep their job, to 30 days. Fired employees would get only seven to ten days to contest their dismissal.
“It is time for the courts to put an end to this assault on the workplace rights of our members and DoD employees across the country.”
Agencies would get multiple reasons to “disallow” a worker’s union representative in disciplinary proceedings—if management claimed it would create a conflict of interest, the representative is needed for other priorities, or releasing them from duty would cost too much. Union members would also be forbidden from representing others while on the clock, because “OPM believes that American taxpayers should not pay for the representation of Federal employees charged with conduct detrimental to the efficiency of the service.”
The proposals would also bar settlement agreements in which the employee agrees to resign voluntarily in exchange for derogatory information in their personnel records being sealed—a practice analogous to out-of-court settlements of civil suits, in which the defendant agrees to pay but without admitting wrongdoing. This practice, the AFGE lawyer said, saves agencies time and resources by avoiding litigation.
They also state that agencies are not required to use progressive discipline, the escalation from warning to suspension to firing, and prohibit them from using tables that set or recommend punishment for different offenses. In particular, they would bar considering the “Douglas factors,” a list of possible mitigating or aggravating circumstances such as where the offense fit on a scale from unintentional to malicious; how much it affected their ability to do their job; balancing it against how long they’d been at the agency and their previous performance; and whether the penalty was consistent with those imposed upon other employees for the same or similar offenses.
“OPM believes these changes are necessary to free supervisors and managers from administrative burdens placed upon them by agency policy or collective-bargaining agreements that prevent them from quickly addressing misconduct in the workplace,” the agency said. Director Scott Kupor dismissed the Douglas factors as a “checkbox process” in a July 1 post on its Substack page.
As of July 20, two weeks before the August 3 deadline for public comments on the proposed rule, the almost 350 comments posted on the Federal Register site were heavily negative. “The Douglas Factors were created to hold managers accountable and to make sure that reviews and disciplinary actions are fair,” retired federal union steward Kelly Turner wrote. “Removing or destroying them is just another way that this treasonous and corrupt administration is trying to make it easier to punish and remove employees.”
The suit about the Department of Agriculture [filed in California] charges that last spring, it began pursuing a reorganization in defiance of specific directions from Congress that it not downsize staff without congressional approval.
A 2025 department memo, the union coalition’s lawyers noted in one brief, announced plans to relocate many programs and offices out of Washington and to consolidate or move others around the country. USDA’s actual goal, they argue, is to shrink its workforce by almost one-fourth, and that forced relocations are part of its method because it is “anticipating that a significant number of employees will decline geographic reassignments.”
The department has announced plans to close the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center complex in Maryland, described as “the nation’s premier agricultural research facility,” with more than 300 scientists and others working on projects ranging from animal parasitic diseases to food safety. On June 29, the brief says, many researchers received “management directed reassignment” messages instructing them to report to new locations by Oct. 5—and “giving them 30 days to decide whether to move or resign.”
The Department of Defense suit seeks a preliminary injunction blocking Secretary Hegseth’s termination of collective-bargaining agreements. It calls his order “a textbook example of arbitrary-and-capricious agency action that violates the Administrative Procedure Act.”
Hegseth, it argues, gave no reason for his order other than that it was “required to align agency operations with national-security requirements,” under Trump’s March 2025 executive order that exempted more than 40 Cabinet departments and federal agencies from the law granting their employees the right to unions—on the pretext that their primary function was national-security work.
His memorandum, the brief noted, “did not point to any facts” showing that any of the collective-bargaining agreements it annulled “were inconsistent with national security,” and it also ignored more than 60 years of federal policy and law authorizing collective bargaining. As a result, it stated, department agencies have been telling workers “the union does not exist anymore,” forcing them to sign statements that they no longer have union representation, “unilaterally changing” conditions of employment such as scheduling, and refusing to hear grievances or let employees have union representation in the disciplinary process.
NFFE National President Randy Erwin accused the Trump administration of “unilaterally and illegally stripping collective bargaining rights from DoD workers.”
“It is time for the courts to put an end to this assault on the workplace rights of our members and DoD employees across the country,” he added.
That assault is a key part of the agenda laid out by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 in “Mandate for Leadership,” the blueprint for governing during Trump’s second term it released in late 2023.
Heritage head Kevin Roberts denounced the “administrative state” as a “wasteful and corrupt” bureaucracy infiltrated by “woke culture warriors.” Russell Vought, now director of the Office of Management and Budget, declared that as the Constitution vests all executive power in the President, he must have the “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”
“Personnel is policy,” argued the three veteran bureaucrats who wrote its “Managing the Bureaucracy” chapter. They also suggested that Congress should “consider whether public-sector unions are appropriate in the first place,” as “after more than half a century of experience with public-sector union frustrations of good government management,” it is hard to avoid reaching the conclusion “that these unions were not compatible with constitutional government.”