Although President Donald Trump has claimed that “every policy” of his administration was “designed to lift up the American worker,” he has acted consistently, since returning to office in January 2025, to undermine workers’ chosen representatives, America’s labor unions.
The most flagrant Trump action along these lines occurred in March 2025, when he issued an executive order that terminated collective bargaining rights for more than 1 million federal government employees. This measure, the largest single union-busting action in American history, ended union representation and protections for 1 out of 14 unionized workers in the United States.
Trump’s anti-union campaign dovetailed with his efforts to terminate the employment of hundreds of thousands of federal workers, many of them union members. Federal workers, Trump claimed, are “destroying this country,” and are “crooked” and “dishonest.” “Many of them,” he said, “don’t work at all.”
To supervise his massive purge of public employees, Trump chose Elon Musk―the world’s wealthiest individual and largest donor to his presidential campaign―to direct a mysterious Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Delighted with the job, Musk declared, without any evidence, that there were “people on the government payroll who are dead” and others “who are not real people.” Addressing a conference of conservatives, the flamboyant multibillionaire charged that “waste is pretty much everywhere” and brandished a chain saw against what he called “bureaucracy.”
As Musk’s minions rampaged through federal agencies, planning large-scale firings, DOGE informed workers that, if they voluntarily resigned, they would be paid without working during the remainder of the fiscal year. Confronted with the difficult choice of possible termination or resignation with some financial compensation, 154,000 employees signed up in the first six months for the new voluntary resignation program. “Nobody really knew if your job was safe,” recalled a former Social Security Administration employee. “I thought, better just to take it voluntarily, rather than being forced out.”
Labor unions, of course, were appalled by the situation, and turned to the federal courts for redress. But, although some lower court decisions bolstered their efforts to maintain union rights and job security for federal workers, courts at a higher level, including the Republican-dominated U.S. Supreme Court, granted Trump most of the expanded powers that he claimed.
Thus far, the mass termination of federal workers has wreaked havoc on their lives―ending careers, undermining financial security, and creating severe mental distress. And it has also produced a weaker labor movement.
Estimates are that 300,000 federal workers will have lost or left their jobs by the end of 2025.
Meanwhile, the embattled labor movement turned to Congress. Here it worked to secure passage of the Protect America’s Workforce Act, which would repeal Trump’s executive order abolishing union rights. In the House of Representatives, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) refused to allow a vote on the legislation, promoted by the AFL-CIO and by Democrats. On November 17, however, the sponsor of the legislation, Representative Jared Golden (D-ME), finally secured the necessary 218 signatures (from 213 Democrats and 5 renegade Republicans) on a discharge petition to force House action, which presumably will occur soon.
Golden predicted that “Congress will not stand idly by while President Trump nullifies federal workers’ collective bargaining agreements and rolls back generations of labor law.” Even so, as the repeal legislation has only one declared Republican backer in the GOP-controlled U.S. Senate, its passage by that body seems unlikely.
Another major target of Trump’s anti-union campaign is the venerable National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). A product of landmark New Deal legislation in 1935, the NLRB is the sole recourse for private-sector workers seeking to assert their rights under labor law. This includes the right to join with coworkers to improve their working conditions, as well as the right to choose union representation. By supervising workplace elections to determine if workers want such representation, the NLRB plays a vital role in facilitating the establishment of unions.
It's no accident, then, that Trump moved rapidly to cripple the NLRB. On January 27, 2025, he fired Gwynne Wilcox, the acting NLRB board chair―action unprecedented in the 90-year history of the agency. As half of her term remained, it was also illegal. Furthermore, the firing left the agency without the quorum necessary to function, thus shutting it down. In addition, on that same day, Trump fired the NLRB’s general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, replacing her with a Republican loyalist. During Abruzzo’s tenure, she had issued memos prohibiting common anti-labor practices by corporations. Her Republican successor quickly reversed the memos.
By August 2025, the NLRB was in sorry shape. Elon Musk, who scorned “the idea of unions,” had been angered by the NLRB’s investigation of the anti-labor practices of his SpaceX corporation. Consequently, he brought suit against the federal agency, charging that―despite a Supreme Court ruling in 1937 that declared the NLRB constitutional―the federal agency was actually unconstitutional. In August 2025, the rightwing Fifth Circuit Court ruled in Musk’s favor. Since then, the NLRB has been on life support―a status reinforced by the fact that, as of late November, only one of its five board positions has been filled, leaving it without a quorum and, therefore, unable to function.
Trump has also limited the activities of another agency that could assist unions: the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. Established in 1947, the agency has helped to resolve difficult labor disputes, such as those leading to strikes. As unions have been on the defensive for decades against increasingly aggressive corporate tactics, it is often to their advantage to settle their grievances through mediation rather than strike action. Therefore, it’s revealing that, in March 2025, Trump directed the agency to eliminate “non-statutory components” and to reduce its statutory functions and associated personnel to the minimum required by law.
Against this backdrop, Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, concluded: “This has been the most hostile administration to workers in our lifetimes.”
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Lawrence S. Wittner (https://www.lawrenceswittner.com/ ) is Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press).
