It’s undeniable that representative government in the U.S. is under attack today – and has been for a long time.
In fact, the primary threat to governance of, by and for the people in 21st Century America first emerged more than six decades ago, well before our current president had won fame as a voluble real estate mogul, let alone run for public office.
This crisis, which has greatly diminished public confidence in representative democracy at the federal, state and local levels, was summed up well by attorney, author, and civic leader Philip Howard in his 2023 book, “NOT Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions.”
Elected executives – the president, governors, and mayors – no longer have effective authority over the operations of government. Nor do their appointees. Nor do public supervisors, such as school principals, police captains, and crew chiefs on highway repair teams.
The reason why, as Howard and many other public-policy observers have explained, is the spread since the early 1960s of monopoly-bargaining laws empowering government union officials to codetermine with elected officials and/or their appointees how civil servants are managed and rewarded for their efforts.
At the federal level, monopolistic government unionism has been statutorily authorized and promoted for nearly half a century under the so-called “Civil Service Reform Act” (CSRA), signed into law by Big Labor Democrat President Jimmy Carter in 1978.
As a consequence of the cumulative impact of 46+ years of the CSRA in action, the president – that is, the elected chief executive of the U.S. – has little ability to direct the professional activities of Executive Branch federal employees.
Even Democrat Joe Biden, who properly regarded himself as the most pro-Big Labor president ever, got schooled after declaring in his March 1, 2022, State of the Union address that, with the ebbing of the COVID-19 pandemic, the “vast majority of federal workers” would ”once again work in person.” More than two-and-a-half years later, when Biden was already a lame duck, Bloomberg columnist Matthew Yglesias pointed out that this “never happened.”
The White House issued various directives, and every political appointee I know was routinely in the office. But despite this widespread discontent among his own appointees, Biden never got the workers back.
Sadly, the Biden administration regarded its CSRA-induced inability to manage more than 800,000 unionized federal employees as an unavoidable fact of life. But Donald Trump has decided to make restoration of his own and future presidents’ executive power over the federal workforce a major objective of his second term in office.
President Trump, citing a CSRA provision that empowers the chief executive to prohibit union monopoly bargaining over federal employees charged with defending national security, recently issued an executive order reducing the number of federal civil servants who are subject to Big Labor’s so-called “exclusive representation” by an estimated 75%.
Because it expands the definition of “national security” so that even employees of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services are included, E.O.14251 is already receiving major pushback from union lawyers, including in ongoing lawsuits from the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) union and National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU).
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has filed its own federal lawsuit in Texas contending that, notwithstanding any and all CSRA provisions to the contrary, the president and his confirmed appointees have executive authority under Article II of the Constitution to terminate, without delay, all monopoly bargaining with federal union bosses.
How are federal union bosses reacting now that a president is finally taking action to put a halt to a system that, as former union attorney Kurt Hanslowe foresaw back in 1967, empowers “entrenched and mutually supportive government officials and collective bargaining representatives” over whom the public has “diminishing control” to make joint decisions about tax rates and other public policies?
True to form, union officials are claiming Trump’s efforts to restore representative government are anti-democratic! For example, American Federation of Government Employees President Everett Kelley, whose union filed the pending lawsuit to block E.O.14251, unsurprisingly claims the Trump Administration’s actions “represent a clear threat” to “every American who “values democracy.”
