Posts tagged Veterans Affairs
Union workers protest at Nashville Veterans Affairs Medical Center
August 19, 2025 // Terminating contracts for VA unions – which have repeatedly opposed significant, bipartisan VA reforms and rewarded bad employees for misconduct – is a huge win for Veterans. Because of this decision, VA staff will spend more time with Veterans, VA facilities can focus on treating Veterans instead of catering to union bosses, and VA can manage its staff according to Veterans’ needs, not union demands. As a result of this move, nearly 1,900 union representatives, who had been collecting government salaries to do union work, have returned to full-time VA work on behalf of Veterans.
FEMA joins other federal agencies in canceling union contracts
August 12, 2025 // On Friday, FEMA’s acting administrator, David Richardson, sent a memo to American Federation of Government Employees Local 4060, the union representing the agency, saying that FEMA’s collective bargaining agreement had been terminated, ending a nearly 10-year contract.
VA severs ties with most federal unions, terminating worker contracts
August 7, 2025 // Veterans Affairs leaders on Wednesday announced plans to terminate nearly all of its collective bargaining contracts with federal unions, upending employment agreements for hundreds of thousands of department workers. The move affects members of the American Federation of Government Employees, the AFL-CIO (AFGE), the National Association of Government Employees (NAGE), the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE), the National Nurses Organizing Committee/National Nurses United (NNOC/NNU) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
New lawsuit scrutinizes Hegseth’s implementation of Trump’s anti-union EO
July 30, 2025 // While previous lawsuits argued simply that President Trump’s citation of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act’s so-called “national security exemption” en masse violated federal regulatory law, a new suit from IFPTE drills down on the Defense secretary’s implementation of the controversial edict.
Trump creates ‘Schedule G’ to add more political appointees to agencies top ranks
July 21, 2025 // The order is the latest in Trump’s effort to establish a tighter grip on the executive branch and its actions. He has already created Schedule Policy/Career, formerly known as Schedule F, which is similarly defined to Schedule G but reserved for career civil servants. Agencies are in the process of determining who qualifies for conversion to Schedule Policy/Career and those employees will become easier to fire for any reason. “President Trump believes creating non-career Schedule G positions will enhance government efficiency and accountability and improve services provided to taxpayers by increasing the horsepower for agency implementation of administration policy,” the White House said in a fact sheet accompanying the order.
Exclusive-US cancels FDA bargaining session over layoffs, union says
May 7, 2025 // Senior U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman on April 25 issued an injunction to block the executive order from being implemented, pending the outcome of a lawsuit by the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), which represents about 160,000 federal employees including as many as 9,000 FDA staff. The Trump administration has appealed that injunction. A five-hour, virtual meeting between the union and the Department of Health and Human Services to discuss mass layoffs at the FDA was axed the evening before it was set to take place. No reason was given for the cancellation and no attempt was made to reschedule it, according to NTEU chapter president Anthony Lee.
Largest federal employee union, a leading Trump opponent, to lay off more than half of staff
April 28, 2025 // “It’s going to demolish us,” said Justin Youngblood, president of an AFGE chapter that represents workers at a VA hospital in Kansas City, Missouri. “That’s going to cut the legs off of AFGE and all of the locals.” He said the union's national leadership should have been better prepared to manage an expected downturn in revenue during Trump's second term.
Court Rules Trump Move Ending Federal Worker Union Contracts Is ‘Unlawful’
April 27, 2025 // While preliminary, the injunction is significant because it could help to maintain worker protections enshrined in the contracts and enable covered workers to file grievances via processes laid out in them. Most of the nation’s more than two million federal employees are represented by unions. The ruling could also lead to the restoration of dues collection from members, which the NTEU says bring in $25 million annually. That is because follow-up guidance on Trump’s original executive order from the Office of Personnel Management stated that agency resources “should not be expended to facilitate payment of union dues.” Labor groups have filed dozens of legal challenges to Trump’s executive orders, which have led to pauses in firings of some federal workers who lost their jobs as part of the administration’s efforts to reduce government bloat.
Employees swarm to second ‘deferred resignation’ offer, though some are receiving unexpected responses
April 15, 2025 // Employees across the department had until April 8 to opt into the program. Widespread layoffs are expected shortly, followed by relocations into new hubs around the country. USDA has implemented a heavy pressure campaign to motivate employees to accept the extended paid leave offer as it seeks to minimize the number of employees it must lay off through reductions in force. Employees received as many as 20 emails from HR, agency leadership and their own supervisors during the week the DRP window was open encouraging them to take advantage of the offer. “We were being peppered like hot wings before grilling,” one employee who received the email barrage said.