The White House took a step last week that significantly undercuts the idea that federal employment should be nonpartisan. No modern presidential administration has undertaken such an effort to staff the entire government with political loyalists.
Applicants for government jobs will be required to write essays explaining how they will advance President Donald Trump’s policy priorities. The new procedure aims to limit hiring from elite universities.
Rendering collective bargaining inapplicable to the vast majority of federal workers, combined with the administration’s other attacks on the civil service, would leave the federal workforce in its weakest position in a century.
“This is a way to defund Black people as a whole," retired federal worker Janice Lee said, referring to the layoffs of black government workers.
Organized labor and its allies can and must do much more to respond to the crisis created by DOGE and the Trump administration. As the nation’s largest employer, the federal government’s labor relations policies inevitably ripple across the economy.
James Goodwin, the policy director at the Center for Progressive Reform, explains what the “bleak” world of labor under Project 2025 would look like.
Even as Donald Trump seeks to disavow Project 2025, he and the rightwing effort’s authors have voiced similarly hostile plans for the US’s 2 million-plus federal employees – to replace many of them with political appointees.
Donald Trump has pledged to revive an executive order known as Schedule F that would give him the power, if re-elected president, to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of government civil servants, a step toward autocracy.
In separate actions over a few days, House and Senate Republicans moved to undercut worker due process rights, weaken labor organizations and protect companies with workplace violations affecting contractor employees.
"I don't think that the model that Scott Walker has put forward is a model for success," said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. "That's the model that the Koch Brothers have tried to spread everywhere."
Charles and his brother David Koch operate one of the most powerful conservative groups in the nation and have supported efforts across the country to curtail union rights.
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