Portside

Two days into the government shutdown in October, Ellen Mei, who administered SNAP benefits at the United States Department of Agriculture, appeared on MSNBC. Mei, who was also president of her union chapter, warned viewers that millions of Americans might struggle to access food assistance, a problem exacerbated by staff reductions earlier in the year. She was promptly notified she would be fired. She told me she is fighting the decision with the help of a union lawyer, in part to rally her co-workers. “I don’t know if morale can go that much lower,” she said. “Especially after we lost half the people in our office. There’s so little hope left. I’m trying to show that we’re not taking this.”

Since the start of his second term, Trump has cut the federal work force by more than 300,000 people. In March, he signed an executive order stripping more than a million federal workers of their collective-bargaining rights. The order invoked a provision of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act that exempts the government from extending bargaining rights to workers at agencies whose “primary function” is national security. It affected more than 30 agencies and agency subdivisions, including the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S.D.A. — but not, paradoxically, many workers actively involved in national security, such as Border Patrol agents, whose union endorsed Trump in the 2024 election.

A week before the shutdown, Russell Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, urged federal agencies “to use this opportunity” to further dismantle the federal work force. Soon Trump was threatening to withhold back pay from furloughed federal employees, in defiance of a 2019 law he signed in his first administration. “I would say it depends on who we’re talking about,” he told reporters. “There are some people that really don’t deserve to be taken care of.”

As they had all year, federal labor unions were struggling to find a way to respond. The federal government is the largest employer in the country, with more than two million civilian workers, who might perform coastal restoration, ensure food safety or administer Social Security benefits. The American Federation of Government Employees, or A.F.G.E., the largest federal labor union, relied on tactics it had used for decades: lobbying and filing lawsuits.

‘I would say it depends on who we’re talking about,’ Trump told reporters. ‘There are some people that really don’t deserve to be taken care of.’

But for a growing rank-and-file movement of mostly younger union members, which works across agencies and is known as the Federal Unionists Network (FUN), the shutdown presented an unusual opportunity. Like the progressive upstarts challenging the old-guard leadership of the Democratic Party, FUN is pushing the national unions to fight the Trump administration more vigorously.

With the shutdown, FUN saw a chance to show that the fate of federal workers is inexorably bound up with the public’s welfare. The group hoped to capitalize on the outcry over cuts to government jobs and services that have had an impact on blue and red states alike. (More than 80 percent of federal employees live outside the Washington metropolitan area.) Members held rallies to encourage Senate Democrats to keep up their filibuster as lawmakers sought to pressure the administration to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies. FUN also staged actions to draw attention to the services under threat, drawing on a labor strategy known as “bargaining for the common good.” At a food drive outside the U.S.D.A., more than 100 federal workers donated some 1,600 pounds of food and $20,000 for food banks.

But as the shutdown wore on, Everett Kelley, A.F.G.E.’s president, had become increasingly worried that it was federal workers who needed those donations. In late October, he woke up to reports of federal employees standing in a food-bank line. Not long after, he volunteered to serve food at a church mission in Maryland. “I saw little children of federal employees coming through this line,” Kelley told me. To him, it was as if federal employees were being held hostage by both parties for their own ends. On Oct. 27, Kelley effectively called on Democrats to end their filibuster.

\To FUN members, A.F.G.E.’s willingness to capitulate was emblematic of the problems with Kelley’s approach: a narrow focus on the short-term hardships of its members at the expense of the larger political battle. “I get why any union would be hesitant to embrace this kind of fight, especially in the face of an administration that has shown it is completely willing to pursue aggressive political and legal retaliation,” Chris Dols, FUN’s co-founder, told me. “That’s why it has to come from below. That’s our entire project. How do we give voice to federal unionists who are willing to take some risks that the unions aren’t willing to?”

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_{Chris Dols helped found the Federal Unionists Network (FUN) in 2023 to build a labor movement that could unite federal workers across the government. It took off after Trump’s inauguration last year. Photo by Kholood Eid} 

Two days before the shutdown ended, Kelley lashed out at FUN during a meeting of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. executive council, which comprises more than 50 leaders from its affiliated unions, suggesting that the group’s continued support of the Democratic filibuster was undermining A.F.G.E. “He didn’t go into great detail, but it was intense,” one union president recalled, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to talk candidly about an internal meeting. At the time, the Department of Transportation was canceling a significant percentage of flights across the country because of a shortage of air traffic controllers, and pressure was building on the administration. The union president shared FUN’s position and speculated that many others on the council did, too. “It was just at the point of maximum pressure,” he said, noting that polling showed the public blamed Republicans more than Democrats for the shutdown.

‘I felt like my voice had been taken away.’

Kelley credited A.F.G.E. for kick-starting the process that reopened the government. But to Dols and other members of FUN, the union merely provided Democrats with cover to justify giving in. Kelley told me that members who wanted the filibuster to continue were “few and far between.” But many A.F.G.E. workers I spoke with felt betrayed by his decision. Mae apGovannon, a member of A.F.G.E. and a FUN activist who reviews disability claims at the Department of Veterans Affairs, was enraged. “I felt like my voice had been taken away,” they said.

The shutdown — and the response to it — exposed the underlying weakness of federal unions, which have been largely moribund for decades. Before Trump’s second term, many federal workers rarely thought about their unions, if they belonged to them at all. In 2023, only a quarter of eligible federal workers were union members. (Federal unions are “open shop,” meaning no one is required to belong or pay dues, even though the union is legally obligated to represent all the workers in their bargaining unit.) And since 1962, when federal workers were first granted collective-bargaining rights, they have been explicitly prohibited from striking, significantly reducing their leverage in negotiations.

Trump didn’t just end collective-bargaining rights; he also eliminated automatic payroll deductions of dues, depriving unions of much-needed funds to contest the administration’s policies. In August, A.F.G.E. was forced to lay off 30 percent of its staff as money dried up. “A.F.G.E. punches below our weight because we have failed to organize members appropriately for a long time,” says Dave Casserly, an A.F.G.E. member and an attorney for the Department of Labor, who emphasized he was speaking in his personal capacity and not for the department. “The union was sold to them as if it were selling them their job insurance. So, once we’re not providing that anymore, they have no reason to be a member of the union.”

Trump’s executive order was “the biggest act of union-busting in U.S. history,” Joseph McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown University, told me. Roughly 80 percent of unionized federal workers lost their bargaining rights. McCartin views it as far more radical than when Ronald Reagan broke the air traffic controllers union following its 1981 strike. “The Reagan administration never tried to uproot collective bargaining root and branch,” he says. “It never challenged the idea that collective bargaining had a place in government.”

Federal workers already had the fewest collective-bargaining rights of any unionized employees. They are not only barred from striking; they are not even allowed to assert the right to strike. Nor can they bargain for higher wages or benefits. “The crisis is that federal workers have ended up with a system that most other union members would not accept to begin with,” says David Kusnet, a former staff member of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, one of the country’s largest public-employee unions.

‘Federal workers have ended up with a system that most other union members would not accept to begin with.’

In many countries, labor unrest has often served as a political counterweight. A wave of public-employee strikes in France, in 1995, essentially shut down the country for weeks, forcing the conservative government to abandon several proposed cuts to the welfare state. And in 2024, South Korea’s second-largest union called for a general strike in the wake of the president’s declaration of martial law, a move that helped persuade him to back down.

“If we could strike — I’m not implying anything — I think it would make a big difference,” Kelley, the president of A.F.G.E., told me. Federal workers have struck before, notably in 1970, when 200,000 postal workers staged a wildcat strike that won them higher wages and the right, unprecedented for employees of the federal government, to bargain for wages and benefits. But the legacy of the 1981 air traffic controllers strike, and the Reagan administration’s harsh reprisal, continues to cast a pall on the labor movement. (In 1980, there were 187 major strikes; in 2024, there were 31.)

Liz Shuler, the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., who represents 15 million private- and public-sector workers, told me that internal data shows workers are not ready for a general strike. “We are not there,” she said. “There’s a lot of deep education and mobilization that’s happening within our unions to get us ready for a moment where we might need to strategically call for a one-day strike or a strike in a particular industry.”