Federal employee unions fight for survival as Trump tries to eviscerate them
Source: NPR
May 11, 2025 6:00 AM ET
By late March, Anthony Lee should have gotten a heads up that mass layoffs at the Food and Drug Administration were about to begin. Instead the union president found out when he started getting panicked calls early one morning.
Employees were learning they were being fired while swiping their badges to get into work. A green light meant go. A red light meant stop. "For dozens, hundreds of employees, it just went red and they weren't able to enter the building," Lee says. "That's the way a lot of people did find out that their federal service was ending."
Lee is president of NTEU Chapter 282, the union representing close to 9,000 FDA employees. Under the union's collective bargaining agreement, the government is required to provide advance notice of any reduction in force. But the Trump administration gave no such notice. Nor did it consult with Lee when it ended the union's telework agreement. "Basically we've been ignored," says Lee.
Attacks on unions "exponentially worse"
President Trump's antipathy toward federal sector unions is well known. Still, Lee says Trump's attacks on unions now are "exponentially worse" than in the president's first term. "Even our ability to exist in the federal workplace — to be able to represent employees — is threatened by this administration," he says. Trump's efforts to slash the federal workforce by hundreds of thousands of workers could decimate union bargaining units. And even where workers remain, he has moved to end the right to union representation for wide swaths of the workforce.
Read more: https://www.npr.org/2025/05/11/nx-s1-5381156/trump-federal-workers-labor-union-collective-bargaining