Posts tagged America First Policy Institute
Two years after the UAW strike
September 26, 2025 // Two years ago, tomorrow (September 26, 2023), then-President Joe Biden became the first president to participate in a striking worker picket line. The occasion was the United Auto Workers (UAW) strike against General Motors. Biden addressed the UAW members outside the Willow Run parts center near Detroit, Michigan.
Backgrounder: Trump Civil Service Reform Proposed Rule
April 27, 2025 // On April 23, 2025, OPM proposed a new rule to improve accountability for federal career employees, especially those in policy roles. The rule implements President Trump’s Executive Order 14171, which he signed on his first day in office. Executive Order 14171 explicitly directed OPM to render civil service regulations implemented during the Biden administration inoperative, citing the President’s authority to manage the executive branch. Among other things, the rule would create a new job category called Schedule Policy/Career in the excepted service for policy-influencing positions, making them at-will employees and, therefore, meaningfully accountable for their performance and conduct.
What Trump’s win means for the federal workforce
November 6, 2024 // That’s because Trump has vowed to revive Schedule F, a controversial abortive effort at the end of his first term to strip the civil service protections of potentially tens of thousands of career federal workers in “policy-related” positions, effectively making them at-will employees. Trump and many of his former staffers have frequently bemoaned that “rogue bureaucrats” inhibited his policymaking power during his first stint in the White House. Though President Biden quickly rescinded Schedule F when he took office in 2021—before any positions could be converted out of the federal government’s competitive service—that hasn’t stopped Trump and his allies from working on the initiative in absentia. Both the Heritage Foundation and America First Policy Institute, which have organized dueling unofficial transition projects have endorsed reviving Schedule F, going so far as to creating lists of upwards of 50,000 current career civil servants to strip of their removal protections and threaten with termination.
Op-ed: A Raise for Auto Workers May Imperil Biden’s Electric Vehicle Ambitions
October 5, 2023 // Ford CEO Jim Farley said the UAW's proposals could send the automaker into bankruptcy, while Barra said they were not "realistic." Dan Ives, research analyst for Wedbush Securities, said in a note to investors that the UAW's demands, if fully accepted, could cause automakers "to pass these costs onto the consumer" by increasing E.V. prices by as much as $5,000 each. By visiting an active picket line, Biden made his preference clear in the fight between unions and management. But depending on how the negotiations go, he may not be able to have it both ways: Either UAW members can get a big raise, or automakers can push forward in the transition to electric vehicles.
As Auto Strike Looms, Biden Admin Announces $15.5 Billion For Electric Vehicle Manufacturers
September 6, 2023 // President Biden has a couple of problems. Electric vehicles aren’t flying off the lot. Autoworkers’ unions are mad at him for pushing EVs which could kill their jobs. So, what’s Biden’s administration’s solution to this two-tiered conundrum? To put it bluntly, he is now speeding up the delivery of $15.5 billion — courtesy of the U.S. taxpayers — to artificially hold up the market in hopes of appeasing his political allies.
Conservative Supreme Court hands down a rare pro-union decision
June 5, 2023 // Unlike appearing before lower courts, lawyers at the Supreme Court not only argue the application of the law, but also “what the law should be” because the justices can overturn precedent. The Ohio decision, he said, is important because it reinforces “the rights of federal-sector unions to exist and to collectively bargain and to work in a civilian capacity.”
Union arbitrators are protecting truly awful government employees
October 10, 2022 // Federal personnel challenges go beyond the civil service system. Federal unions are also a big part of the problem. The government was not supposed to operate this way. Congress expressly directed agencies not to tolerate misconduct and to fire poor performers. The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 even made these directives “Merit System Principles.” But agencies come nowhere close to upholding these principles. Barely a third of federal employees say their agencies remove employees whose performance is persistently poor. Half report poor performers stay on the job and continue to underperform.
Do arbitrators go easy on federal employees who challenge being fired?
October 4, 2022 // So in the federal sector, if you’re represented by a union, you have an option if your agency tries to fire you. you can appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board what we think of as these standard civil service protections. But you can also file a grievance under your union contract, it’s an either or you can’t do both. But if you choose to, you can file a grievance under the union contract, and your union can bring that instead to an arbitrator. Generally, these are private contractors, they work with the private sector unions, with the private companies with nothing to do with unions, as well as with the the federal workforce, there’s a master roster, maintained by the Federal Mediation Conciliation Service, and the contracts pretty much all say, you’ll get a list of names from this master roster, people strike names to union agency until one guy’s left. That guy then is the arbitrator.
President Biden Sides Against Union Rank-and-File
April 18, 2022 // Of course, siding against workers is not the best look politically. Neither is shutting down transparency. The Biden Administration understandably rolled back the transparency regulation very quietly. Biden’s Labor Department killed the rule without fanfare on December 30 — the day before the New Year’s Eve holiday, when most union members and the press enjoyed Christmas vacations.
To Help Workers, Unions and Democrats Should Support Scott’s ERA
April 13, 2022 // The ERA’s policies are wildly popular. Recent polling shows that 70% of those polled – including 76% of individuals in union households – believe that workers should have the right to a secret ballot. Other major provisions – including the right to withhold dues from political spending, privacy protections, and the criminalization of union threats – poll at an average favorability of 70%.