Trump Voids Union Contracts For More Than A Million Federal Workers On National Security Grounds, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The People Who Run The Government Could Still Bargain Over How They Are Treated

WASHINGTON. Acting to neutralize a threat that had been hiding in plain sight at veterans hospitals, passport windows, and food-safety labs across the country, President Trump signed an executive order Thursday stripping collective bargaining rights from more than a million federal employees, at last freeing the United States from the danger that the people who run its government might have a say in their own working conditions.

The order, titled "Exclusions From Federal Labor-Management Programs," invokes a narrow national-security provision of the 1978 law governing the federal workforce, a provision Congress wrote with spies and code-breakers in mind, and applies it to nurses, claims processors, scientists, and clerks at the Departments of Veterans Affairs, State, Defense, Energy, Treasury, Interior, Justice, Health and Human Services, and roughly a dozen other agencies. Administration officials explained that a worker who inspects meat, answers a benefits hotline, or maintains a weather satellite is, on closer inspection, a frontline combatant whose union grievance form imperils the republic.

"Certain federal unions have declared war on President Trump's agenda," the White House noted in a fact sheet accompanying the order, clarifying that the appropriate response to a union exercising its legal right to disagree with the President is to abolish the union. The document went on to praise the move as an overdue modernization, on the theory that the most modern possible workplace is one in which the employer can change the terms at will and the employee can write a letter.

Labor organizations representing the affected workers, several of which had recently sued the administration over unrelated matters, described the order as the largest act of union-busting in American history and noted the convenient timing. A federal judge agreed and blocked the order; an appeals court then allowed it to take effect while the case proceeds, establishing the reassuring principle that a right can be both protected and erased depending on which courthouse one happens to be standing in.

Pressed on whether voiding hundreds of signed contracts in a single afternoon set a precedent that a future president might one day turn against industries this administration prefers, one official within the administration responded that the question presupposed a future in which someone other than this President was making the decisions. The official declined to elaborate.

At press time, the more than one million affected workers had been reassured that nothing about their jobs would change, with the exception of their pay, their schedules, their protections, their recourse, and their ability to do anything about any of it.