I & I Editorial BoardWhile Democrats were busy hyperventilating over the nothingburger “Signal scandal,” President Donald Trump quietly took an action that could do more to drain the swamp – and Democratic Party finances – than any other action he’s taken to date.
On Thursday, Trump signed an executive order that ends collective bargaining rights for most federal workers, a move that “is a magnitude of tenfold on what they’ve done so far on their attack of the federal workforce and the labor movement,” Cathy Creighton, director of Cornell University’s Industrial and Labor Relations Buffalo Co-Lab, told the Washington Post.
Actually, it is the first step toward righting a wrong committed by President John Kennedy in 1962 when he signed an executive order allowing federal workers the right to collectively bargain. Up until then, politicians on both sides of the aisle agreed that letting government workers unionize was a terrible idea.
Even the sainted FDR attacked the idea as “unthinkable and intolerable,” saying that “the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.”
But Kennedy needed to pay unions back for their crucial support in his narrow election victory and, once he did so, union membership among federal workers soared. In 1978, Congress turned Kennedy’s executive order into law with the Civil Service Reform Act, which had the strong support of the American Federation of Government Employees.
FDR was wrong in one sense. The process of collective bargaining could be transplanted into the public service – just at an enormous cost to taxpayers.
Today, a third of federal workers are union members, compared with less than 7% in the private sector. They earn far more in pay and benefits than their private-sector counterparts – and more still if you account for the fact that they are far less productive. Worse, federal workers spend nearly 3 million work hours conducting union business instead of doing their jobs, costing taxpayers roughly $135 million a year.
Federal unions return the favor by giving most of their campaign cash to Democrats, who they know will keep the government fat, dumb, and happy. In 2024, 96% of AFGE contributions went to Democrats. Since 1990, Democrats got more than 90% of that union’s money in all but three election years.
Trump’s order is the first concrete step taken by any president to undo the damage caused by Kennedy.
Trump is taking an expansive view of a provision in the 1978 law to end collective bargaining at agencies with a role in safeguarding national security. For Trump, this includes not just Defense and Homeland Security, but the Treasury and Energy departments, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Federal Communications Commission, the General Services Administration, and other federal offices.
Government Executive magazine says that the order affects “67% of the federal workforce, and 75% of federal workers who are currently represented by unions.”
This is a good first step. But unless Congress follows up with a law overturning the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, Trump’s action can instantly be undone by the next Democratic president.
To that end, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn, has introduced the Federal Workforce Freedom Act, which would forbid federal employees from joining unions, ban collective bargaining deals, and terminate all existing collective bargaining agreements.
If Republicans are serious about dismantling the deep state, getting this bill to Trump’s desk should be job No. 1.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
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Peter Roff
This will never happen. I wish it would but it’s a sop to make us things are really going to change.
Senator Blackman’s bill is good, except for the ban on union membership. That would not stand up to judicial revue.
Defense and entitlements and now interest on the debt are the big ticket items. Trillions.
The bigger issue for President Trump is the monopolies of all unions; UAW, Teachers, Longshoremen, Steelworkers and the other large union monopolies.
Recall, it was that monopoly power, lack of competitiveness, and high cost of our union monopolies that sent millions of US worker jobs overseas decades ago seeking competitive costs and sensible work rules, and often a better non-union built product.
Trump needs to put the monopolistic unions under the oversight of Sherman Antitrust before bringing millions of job back here to the same high costs.
Each union has much more economic, nation security and culturally disruptive power than the merger of any two US corporations.
Sherman-ize the union monopolies, first.
And take JFK’s name off the Kennedy Center, for goodness sake!
The existence of AFGE was always a joke in that they could not strike, and the collective bargaining over contracts for Fed workers basically boiled down to how much the union pledged to the dem party in order to score some work perks. Too, many of the union officers did very little work other than to spend most of their lives working on union stuff, whatever that amounted to.
The simple fact it 10% of the workers do all the work. At this point, Trump would love them to go on strike.
If mgmt treated workers decent there wouldn’t be any need for unions.
The counter argument against what you and many newspaper editors pontificate about, is that the vast percentage of American private enterprise workers elect not to be in any union, by their own choice!
So, why does anyone at all in the USA, protect the monopolies of unionized workers, UAW, Steelworkers, Longshoreman, Teachers, etc., who refuse to compete fairly in the market place and who are protected by the equally non-competitively minded Democrats…which drove millions of American jobs abroad decades ago…and will keep millions of those jobs abroad unless “someone,” (wonder who that could be?) can reform and put the union monopolies under the authority of the Sherman Antitrust, anti-Monopoly law, and require them to compete fairly…. in America, for heavens sake!!.
Now you know why our “public servants” average $144K a year in pay and benefits. How much did you (taxpayers) make who are their employers?
⭐️ This is absolutely essential if we want to take this country back from the criminal gangs that hijacked the state. Collective bargaining is for employees of abusive monopolies who are otherwise powerless… and government employees are anything but! No one who is paid with money that was taken from the public by force has a right to collective bargaining – that is just piracy & racketeering.
Godspeed Mister President. As a retired Federal worker, I endorse his message.