In late May, the Trump administration declared void a swath of collective-bargaining agreements with federal unions. These agreements affected employees in more than a dozen agencies, ranging from the Department of Defense to the Transportation Security Administration. The agreements had covered more than four-fifths of the federal civilian workforce, effectively tying the administration’s hands over how to manage personnel in the executive branch. Justifying the order, the administration cited national security and the risks posed by slow management in executive agencies.
To be sure, national security is a legitimate concern; when the president can’t manage the people who handle our top secrets and national defense, the country’s security is surely at greater risk. But the administration might have been on even firmer ground had it relied on simple, gross inefficiency. Today, the federal government is the largest unionized employer on planet Earth. Each year, it spends hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars bargaining with labor organizations. The resulting waste is well documented: Millions are spent on travel, equipment, office space, and the salaries of union officials.
Less well documented is how the system clashes with constitutional governance. Under Article II of the U.S. Constitution, the president has a personal responsibility to manage executive agencies. But he is effectively blocked from doing that by pervasive collective bargaining. Collective bargaining forces him to negotiate over even minor directions to federal employees — the very people who carry out his policies. In effect, he splits his power with union bosses.
The current administration has taken some initial steps to put power back where it belongs. But more is needed. The president should take the next step and urge Congress to join him in rejecting the current system of federal employee collective bargaining.
Though it’s hard to imagine now, collective bargaining in the government was once unheard of, even unthinkable. In the 1930s, the National Labor Relations Act gave private-sector employees the right to form unions and bargain collectively. At the same time, it intentionally excluded government employees. That exclusion tracked popular views at the time. For example, the president who signed the NLRA, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, famously said that bargaining “has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management.” Likewise, Fiorello La Guardia, a former congressman and Depression-era New York City mayor, strongly opposed public employee collective bargaining; he thought it created a conflict between public service and private loyalties (i.e., to a union). And as late as the 1950’s, George Meany, the first president of the AFL-CIO, said that bargaining with the government was “impossible.”
But that started to change in the 1960s. The first state to recognize collective bargaining for government employees was Wisconsin, followed shortly by New York City. Then, in 1962, President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order allowing most federal agencies to recognize unions. But even then, Kennedy couldn’t bring himself to use the words “collective bargaining.” Instead, he wrote that agencies should “consult” with unions.
For the next two decades, bargaining remained (theoretically) a matter of presidential policy. But in 1978, Congress formalized it as a matter of law. The Civil Service Reform Act required federal agencies to recognize unions and bargain about working conditions (but not wages or health and retirement benefits, which were set by statute). That meant if an agency wanted to change something in the workplace, it first had to ask the union. If the union disagreed, the agency had to go to mediation, and eventually to an “impasse” panel. And if the panel sided with the union, the agency could be forced to accept the union’s proposals. In other words, it would have to adopt the union’s policies even if those policies clashed with sound management or the public interest.
In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan fired 10,000 air traffic controllers. That decision changed the debate around public-sector bargaining, but not the legal structure. Modern presidents are still required by law to run their management policies past private labor organizations. That process slows decision-making, drives up costs, and blunts the president’s ability to implement federal policy. In other words, it clashes with the president’s authority. It is more than just wasteful; it is likely unconstitutional.
President Trump has now signed several executive orders affecting federal unions, including the May 2025 order. His administration has also instructed federal agencies to interpret union privileges narrowly, such as by eliminating dues checkoffs. These steps have all weakened the unions’ grip on executive power. The unions, naturally, have challenged those steps, and their challenges are working their way through the court system. But whatever the courts decide, the only way to truly fix the government’s broken personnel system is action by Congress. Only Congress, working with newly confirmed OPM Director Scott Kupor and the President, can scrub collective bargaining and all its inefficiencies from the executive branch.
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That action would correct a historical error. The federal government backed into collective bargaining without ever asking whether it was compatible with constitutional governance. But that lack of consideration should not stop the president from fixing the problem now. Collective bargaining for federal employees is uneconomical, inefficient, and incompatible with the Constitution. FDR was right in 1937: “The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations.”
None of that has changed in the last ninety years. Federal sector collective bargaining should be tossed in the historical dustbin.
Alex MacDonald is a shareholder with Littler Mendelson, PC, and co-chair of Littler’s Workplace Policy Institute. Patrick Pizzella served as U.S. Deputy Secretary of Labor (2018-2021), Member of the Federal Labor Relations Authority (2013-2017) and Assistant Secretary of Labor (2001-2009).