WASHINGTON—As Republican President Donald Trump and his handler, multibillionaire Elon Musk, take Musk’s chainsaw to federal agencies, programs and workers, right-wing Sens. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., part of the Senate’s GOP majority, scheme to end federal worker unions, too.
Their innocuously named Federal Workforce Freedom Act’s headline proclaims it wants to “abolish backroom deals” involving unions and the federal government. But its top paragraph—the “lede” in news jargon—makes its real purpose clear.
They want “to put a stop to ‘collective bargaining’ agreements between federal agencies and labor unions, which harm productivity, increase labor costs, and reduce investment,” or so the two claim, without proof. Doing so would rob the entire labor movement of a significant share of members.
The devil is in the details of their statement. Blackburn and Lee not only want to ban federal worker unions, but collective bargaining about anything and to ban agencies from negotiating with unions about anything. They’d also void all current union contracts.
The unions Blackburn and Lee would harm—the Government Employees, the Treasury Employees, the National Federation of Federal Employees/Machinists and others—are now a substantial section of organized labor, even though federal agencies are technically open shops.
In practical terms, that means the largest, AFGE, represents some 800,000 federal and D.C. workers, but its membership is far lower. The unions had no immediate comment on the Lee-Blackburn bill.
Lee and Blackburn take as their model Trump’s recent dictate abolishing the collective bargaining agreement between the Government Employees (AFGE) on behalf of the nation’s 45,000 Transportation Security Officers—the airport screeners—and the Transportation Department.
Musk and Trump trashed that contract as part of their general slash-and-burn campaign, disregarding the 2001 law establishing the agency. That law also includes a waiver banning the TSOs from unionizing on “national security” grounds.
Bush invoked it
GOP President George W. Bush invoked it, but Democratic successor Barack Obama revoked that ban, letting AFGE win a union recognition election among the screeners.
Blackburn snarled that having 200 TSOs working “on matters important to labor unions” at any one time, as stewards, out of 45,000 total, is a safety risk.
“This legislation would end federal labor unions and immediately” end their contracts “to ensure the federal government is working on behalf of the American people–not labor unions–by increasing the productivity of its workforce,” she sneered.
“Public servants are not like private sector employees,” scoffed Lee. “They should not be able to collectively bargain for leverage over their employers.” The rightist Republican hauled out an old chestnut of a statement by FDR, opposing public worker unions, while taking it out of context.
Lee claimed FDR said unions must be banned because employees “work for the American people.”
But the political motive of the senators’ anti-union bill also appears, deep in their joint press release/ statement. They allege “Federal employee unions overwhelmingly support Democrats, who in turn support union interests.
“During the 2024 election cycle, approximately 96% of AFGE’s political contributions went to Democratic candidates and committees.” They don’t cite other unions, or exit polls about worker votes.
The two senators also scream the federal government acts as “a bill collector” for the unions, through paycheck deductions—overlooking the fact that workers can and do opt out of paying dues.
Think of the federal government as a large right-to-work state. That’s no coincidence: Southern racists created right-to-work in the mid-1940s to prevent Black and white workers from uniting on common goals. And federal unions are a reliable route into the middle class for workers of color.
The federal worker unions emailed had no immediate comment on the legislation, which goes farther than Trump’s platform, Project 2025, does. It advocates “deconstructing the centralized administrative state,” cover words for returning to the spoils system that lasted through the Gilded Age and beyond.
“Political appointees answerable to the president and have decision-making authority in the executive branch are key to this essential task,” it contends.
Project 2025 even contends, again without proof, that “an autonomous bureaucracy has neither independent constitutional status nor separate moral legitimacy. Byzantine personnel rules provide the bureaucrats with their chief means of self-protection. What’s more, knowledge of such rules is used to thwart the president’s appointees and agenda.”
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