President Donald Trump said late Friday that he plans to nullify federal employee union contracts that agencies agreed to late in former President Joe Biden’s term.
In a memo to agency heads, Trump said that Biden officials had negotiated new collective bargaining agreements meant to “to harm my Administration,” in part by undermining his return-to-office mandate, and that he intended to scrap them and bargain his own.
He referred specifically to a contract ratified with the Education Department days before he took office.
“Such last-minute, lame-duck CBAs, which purport to bind a new President to his predecessor’s policies, run counter to America’s system of democratic self-government,” he claimed.
The memo did not make clear his legal justification for nullifying existing union contracts. He referred to a 2010 Supreme Court decision that stated that a president “cannot choose to bind his successors by diminishing their powers.”
“Therefore, it is the policy of the executive branch,” Trump proclaimed, that contracts negotiated within 30 days prior to a presidential inauguration “shall not be approved.”
He said that contracts involving federal law enforcement would be exempted.
The American Federation of Government Employees, a union representing some 800,000 workers, said Trump would be breaching legally binding contracts. The union called it an attempt to “frighten and confuse career federal employees.”
“Federal employees should know that approved union contracts are enforceable by law, and the president does not have the authority to make unilateral changes to those agreements,” Everett Kelley, the union’s president, said in a statement. “AFGE members will not be intimidated. If our contracts are violated, we will aggressively defend them.”
Unions at many federal agencies made a point of negotiating new contracts last year before the Trump administration arrived, with an eye toward locking in contractual protections. Trump has promised to lay off workers en masse, weaken job protections and end the remote work arrangements that federal employees have had for years.
President Donald Trump speaks at the 2025 House Republican Members Conference Dinner at Trump National Doral Miami in Doral, Fla., Monday, Jan. 27, 2025. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein) via Associated Press
HuffPost reported last week on negotiations at the Federal Trade Commission, where a group of attorneys, economists and statisticians secured a temporary contract the weekend before Trump appointed a new Republican chair. Such late agreements appear to be the sort Trump is looking to wipe out early in his tenure.
Warring with the federal workforce was a hallmark of Trump’s first presidency, and he’s quickly picking up where he left off.
On his first day in office he issued an executive order outlining his intention to reclassify tens of thousands of civil servants to make it easier to fire them. Meanwhile, the Office of Personnel Management is offering federal workers a deferred resignation program, suggesting they could resign now and still be paid through September.
OPM sent out a follow-up email about that offer Thursday, answering some frequently asked questions and insulting workers in the process.
“We encourage you to find a job in the private sector as soon as you would like to do so,” the email explained. “The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from their lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.”
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