Deep State Union Gears Up to Sue After Trump Weakens Its Ability to Undermine National Security

The American Federation of Government Employees is the tip of the deep state spear, taking President Trump to court as he tries to rein in the federal bureaucracy.

AFGE promised yet another lawsuit Thursday, shortly after Trump signed an executive order removing the privilege of collective bargaining from a host of federal employees.

“AFGE is preparing immediate legal action and will fight relentlessly to protect our rights, our members, and all working Americans from these unprecedented attacks,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said in a statement. He framed the executive order as “a disgraceful and retaliatory attack on the rights of hundreds of thousands of patriotic American civil servants … simply because they are members of a union that stands up to his harmful policies.”

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Sorry, AFGE, but not everything is about you.

Trump’s order does not mention the union. Rather, it merely strips the privilege of collective bargaining from federal agencies that Trump has determined “to have as a primary function intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work.”

Trump has the right to make such a determination according to 5 USC 7103. The president extended this determination to numerous federal agencies and subdivisions, including the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Health and Human Services, Justice, State, and Veterans Affairs.

The Office of Personnel Management released guidance to those agencies, saying they are “no longer required to collectively bargain with federal unions.”

According to Government Executive, the order will remove collective bargaining privileges from roughly 67% of the entire federal workforce and for 75% of workers already in a union.

No Effect on Unionization Rights

While AFGE and its allies in the legacy media may lament the loss of collective bargaining privileges, Rachel Grezsler, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, explained that federal workers enjoy many other labor protections that this order does not affect.

“He did not take away the right of any federal employee to belong to a union,” she said of Trump. He merely stripped employees’ ability “to negotiate collective bargaining agreements in ways that tie the hands of management, in ways most Americans would say harm the agency’s ability to get things done.”

Federal workers still have different venues in which they can appeal adverse employment decisions, Grezsler noted. They can rely upon the Whistleblower Protection Act, the Merit Systems Protection Board, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

“The law and regulations already provide enormous protections for federal workers,” she explained. “It’s just that the union was one more step of protection. That union can still be there and still provide advice when they go to MSPB, they just can’t bargain over things that, I think, ordinary Americans would say, ‘This is silly. Why are they bargaining over this and why are we paying them to bargain over this instead of doing their jobs?’”