Trump Destroyed Federal Workers’ Unions, They Believe He’d Do It Again

Labor unions have been among Kamala Harris’ most ardent supporters in her presidential campaign, particularly federal employee unions.

Not only do they love her unconditional support for unions, but they also fear what her opponent Donald Trump might do if re-elected.

It is no exaggeration to say that since Harris became vice president, she has played a key role in saving federal employee unions from collapse.

“Things are looking very different under this administration than they did last administration,” said Britta Copt, who has worked at the Environmental Protection Agency for 26 years.

With the stroke of a pen, Trump stripped federal workers’ unions of power

According to government statistics, unions make up about half of the federal government’s civilian workforce of 2.1 million.

Through a series of executive orders signed in 2018, Trump decimated the power of these unions, weakening their ability to negotiate contracts and limiting the time union representatives can spend helping members resolve their grievances.

“We’ve lost the ability to file complaints on almost everything,” says Copt, who is also president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 3607, which represents EPA workers in Colorado and Montana.

Plan to eliminate the “Deep State”

Toward the end of his presidency, Trump came up with an even bolder idea, creating a new category of political appointees called “Appendix F.”

He did so via another executive order, saying it was part of his plan to cleanse the government of “rogue bureaucrats” and dismantle what he calls the “deep state.”

An unknown number of civil servants were to be reclassified as political appointees, meaning they could be fired and replaced. There was talk of transforming some 50,000 positions.

“We were concerned that many of our employees might end up on the F-list,” Copt says.

The executive order was aimed at public officials with political positions, but Copt says no one really knew what that meant. She worried she might end up on the list.

She never found out because Joe Biden was elected president, and one of his first acts was to repeal Schedule F, an executive order Trump signed that targeted federal employee unions.

Harris-led task force revives unions

Biden tapped Vice President Harris to lead a new White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment aimed at strengthening unions across the country.

The task force directed federal agencies to give unions a greater role and ensure that new and current employees are aware of their right to join a union.

“This will be a model for what all industries have the ability and the skill, if not the need, to do,” Harris said at a task force meeting in October 2021.

By 2023, federal employee unions had added about 80,000 new members.

Copt says those changes also paved the way for a strong new labor contract at the EPA, which included a piece on scientific integrity that ensured employees felt safe raising concerns when science was not being considered or was not adequate, as they experienced during the Trump years.

But Copt realizes that all this could end in Trump’s second term.

Federal workers ‘should be nervous’

Georgetown political scientist Donald Moynihan says there is no doubt that if Trump wins in November, his old policies, including Appendix F, will return.

“If you’re a federal employee, you should be nervous right now,” he says.

The federal government now employs about 4,000 political appointees, up from 3,000 three decades ago.

Moynihan warns that if tens of thousands of educated public servants are replaced by partisan advocates, American society will suffer.

“This will slowly destroy the quality of governance,” he says.

“We don’t want to be replaced”

This scenario is extremely worrisome to Tryshanda Moton, a senior aerospace engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

“I think that’s a concern because, you know, we see what Project 2025 says,” Moton says.

The 2025 Project, a 900-page plan developed by the conservative Heritage Foundation, details how a Republican administration would expand presidential power and cut the federal workforce.

Moton, who also serves as a union leader at the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, recently participated in a Zoom call titled “Working for Harris,” pledging to do her part to get Harris elected.

“We took an oath on the Constitution to represent the voters of the American public, and we do not want to be replaced.”

Copyright 2024 NPR