Posts tagged federal workers
Op-ed: Republicans should stop helping Democrats empower union bosses
July 29, 2026 // Policies built on employee choice, such as right-to-work protections, reflect what American workers actually want. The partisan legislation now moving through Congress reflects only what union leadership wants. Pro-worker legislation is not synonymous with pro-union legislation; in fact, they often are opposites. It is time for Congress to wake up and realize this.
Trump strips civil service protections from thousands of workers
June 8, 2026 // The reclassification is part of a wider campaign by Trump to downsize the civil service and realign it toward his policy goals. The administration has developed rules to have federal employees sign nondisclosure agreements, extend suitability standards, end certain layoff protections, cap performance ratings and weaken safeguards for probationary workers. Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told reporters the administration needs people in policy-making positions willing to carry out the president’s directives. It doesn’t matter what political views those federal employees may have, he said. “But if you allow those views to basically interfere with your willingness to actually carry out lawful orders and policy directives of the administration, then this provides a mechanism, obviously, for people in those agencies to be able to be removed effectively at will,” Kupor said.
Trump formalizes move of career federal workers into ‘at will’ roles
June 6, 2026 // An executive order signed by Trump on Wednesday seeks to move those workers into the new class, saying they would be “exempted from the adverse action procedures that make removals for poor performance or misconduct so difficult.” “Consequently, employees with significant policy-making responsibilities can stay in their jobs for years even if they perform poorly, engage in misconduct, or are unwilling to advance Presidential policy across administrations, making their agencies less capable of delivering for the American people,” the White House wrote in a fact sheet describing those now in the schedule as having “at-will positions.”
GOP’s populists flex muscles with wins on Capitol Hill
May 29, 2026 // F. Vincent Vernuccio, president of the Institute for the American Worker think tank, which has argued against the bill, pointed to hesitation that one union official expressed about that format in a Senate hearing last year, calling it undemocratic. “It takes away the whole point of a union because it takes away the vote from workers, and that’s exactly what the Faster Labor Contracts Act would do,” Vernuccio told The Hill. “If the union and the employer can’t come to an agreement within 120 days, this arbitration panel that’s appointed by government bureaucrats would write everything in that contract.”
Trump administration proposes having all federal workers sign NDAs
May 28, 2026 // But the federal workforce’s largest union, the American Federation of Government Employees, decried the draft as an attempt to silence staffers, noting the proposal “sweeps in an extraordinarily broad category of information.” The union said it believes the administration will push agencies to require their employees to sign the NDA and then fire those who refuse.
Unions heighten calls for a bigger federal pay boost next year
April 15, 2026 //
Largest federal workers union warns ICE agents are not trained to replace TSA and putting them in airports ‘does not fill a gap. It creates one’
March 24, 2026 // TSA officers’ call-out rates reached their highest level of the shutdown on Sunday, with 11.76% of workers, or more than 3,450 employees, not showing up to work, DHS data showed. That included about 40% of TSA officers from George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, according to DHS data.
Trump administration wants to streamline federal worker layoffs
March 10, 2026 // The Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s HR arm, published a proposed rule Thursday that it says will streamline the layoff process and put a new emphasis on job performance rankings rather than seniority. The new proposal will now undergo a 60-day comment period and has already faced pushback from the largest federal workers’ union, which has argued that the performance review system has been manipulated to cap how many employees receive high rankings.
A plan to limit when federal employees can cancel their union dues is off the table
March 9, 2026 // A plan to limit when federal employees can cancel their union dues is officially off the table. The Federal Labor Relations Authority is rescinding a previous proposal from 2022, which would have given federal employees only a once-per-year opportunity to cancel dues payments. Since 2020, dues-paying federal employees have had the option to cancel automatic deductions for union dues at any time.