One day after Donald Trump returned to office, a leading government labor union filed a lawsuit against his administration’s reclassification of thousands of federal workers as political hires.
An executive order signed by the president – making public sector workers easier to fire – amounts to a “dangerous step backward”, according to the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents federal government employees across 37 agencies and departments.
The move, one of several actions announced by Trump in the hours after his inauguration on Monday, was swiftly criticized as an attack on workers. As they plotted his return, Trump’s allies claimed to have identified 50,000 federal workers who could be fired.
“You have to go through the process before you can undo a regulation,” said Will Dobbs-Allsopp, policy director at Governing for Impact, a left-leaning thinktank.
Upon returning to the White House on Monday, Trump effectively reinstated “Schedule F”, which sought to allow for the reclassification of tens of thousands of federal workers. Schedule F changed civil service rules to allow for a broad swath of career federal employees to be fired without civil service protection, reclassifying their jobs as political appointments.
“There’s really no such thing, in the vast majority of context, as the resident just saying, ‘I’m going to treat this law as void,’” added Jordan Ascher, a policy counsel at Governing for Impact, who predicted legal challenges at “every step … from rescinding the rule to creating these lists of employees to actually firing people.”
There are some 2.1 million civil service employees in the federal government.
On Tuesday the NTEU filed a lawsuit against the executive order, seeking injunctive relief from its implementation, arguing the order wrongly applies employee rules for political appointees to career staff; deprives federal workers of due process rights they were promised upon hiring and ignores regulations implemented by the office of personnel management.
“Yesterday’s Executive Order is a dangerous step backward to a political spoils system that Congress expressly rejected 142 years ago, which is why we are suing to have the order declared unlawful,” said the NTEU national president Doreen Greenwald. “The employees we represent staff the federal agencies that secure the nation, safeguard the public health, promote economic growth and protect consumers from fraud.
“Their jobs require training and expertise in their chosen field so as to provide the best possible service to all Americans, not passing a political loyalty test.”
Other labor unions have criticized the executive order as an attack on federal employees.
“Putting the job security of non-partisan, dedicated public service workers in the hands of billionaires and anti-union extremists is unacceptable,” said Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the largest public employee union in the US. “While we had hoped for better, we’re not going to sit by and take these attacks.”
Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, said of the impacts of the order – if implemented – would harm the basic, fundamental services provided by federal workers, including caring for veterans; ensuring families receive social security payments; protecting airports and passengers; inspecting food and providing disaster relief. “President Trump’s attack on federal workers began on his first day in office,” she said.
