Instead of “making America great again,” Trump has been trying to make unions weak. But his actions are stirring up younger union members and leading them to band together and fight his administration.
“Two days into the government shutdown in October, Ellen Mei, who administered SNAP benefits at the United States Department of Agriculture, appeared on MSNBC. Mei, who was also president of her union chapter, warned viewers that millions of Americans might struggle to access food assistance, a problem exacerbated by staff reductions earlier in the year. She was promptly notified she would be fired. She told me she is fighting the decision with the help of a union lawyer, in part to rally her co-workers. ‘I don’t know if morale can go that much lower,’ she said. ‘Especially after we lost half the people in our office. There’s so little hope left. I’m trying to show that we’re not taking this.’
Since the start of his second term, Trump has cut the federal work force by more than 300,000 people. In March, he signed an executive order stripping more than a million federal workers of their collective-bargaining rights. The order invoked a provision of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act that exempts the government from extending bargaining rights to workers at agencies whose “primary function” is national security. It affected more than 30 agencies and agency subdivisions, including the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S.D.A. — but not, paradoxically, many workers actively involved in national security, such as Border Patrol agents, whose union endorsed Trump in the 2024 election.
A week before the shutdown, Russell Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, urged federal agencies ‘to use this opportunity’ to further dismantle the federal work force. Soon Trump was threatening to withhold back pay from furloughed federal employees, in defiance of a 2019 law he signed in his first administration. ‘I would say it depends on who we’re talking about,’ he told reporters. “There are some people that really don’t deserve to be taken care of.”
As they had all year, federal labor unions were struggling to find a way to respond. The federal government is the largest employer in the country, with more than two million civilian workers, who might perform coastal restoration, ensure food safety or administer Social Security benefits. The American Federation of Government Employees, or A.F.G.E., the largest federal labor union, relied on tactics it had used for decades: lobbying and filing lawsuits.
But for a growing rank-and-file movement of mostly younger union members, which works across agencies and is known as the Federal Unionists Network (FUN), the shutdown presented an unusual opportunity. Like the progressive upstarts challenging the old-guard leadership of the Democratic Party, FUN is pushing the national unions to fight the Trump administration more vigorously.”
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