The Claim

Signed an executive order exempting agencies with national security missions from federal collective bargaining requirements in order to bolster border, national, and energy security.

The Claim, Unpacked

What is literally being asserted?

The President signed an executive order that removed collective bargaining rights from federal agencies whose missions involve national security, and this was done to strengthen border security, national security, and energy security.

What is being implied but not asserted?

The claim implies that collective bargaining was somehow impeding the national security missions of these agencies — that union contracts were making the country less safe. It implies a targeted, surgical action affecting agencies whose work is genuinely security-related. The placement in the “FORGING A STRONGER, MODERNIZED MILITARY FORCE” section implies this is primarily a military readiness measure.

What is conspicuously absent?

The claim omits that the order affected 67% of the entire federal workforce and 75% of unionized federal workers — more than one million people — including VA nurses, IRS customer service representatives, FDA food inspectors, National Weather Service meteorologists, and Patent and Trademark Office examiners. It omits that the administration presented no evidence that collective bargaining had ever impeded a national security operation. It omits that this is the largest single action of union-busting in American history, that it followed a blueprint laid out in Project 2025, and that federal courts initially blocked it as likely unconstitutional retaliation before appeals courts reversed on procedural grounds.

Evidence Assessment

Established Facts

Executive Order 14251 was signed on March 27, 2025, excluding more than 40 agencies and subdivisions from federal labor-management relations statutes. ¹ The order invoked Section 7103(b)(1) of Title 5, United States Code, a provision of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 that allows the President to exclude agencies from collective bargaining coverage if two conditions are met: the agency has “a primary function of intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work,” and the statute “cannot be applied to that agency or subdivision in a manner consistent with national security requirements and considerations.” The order amended Executive Order 12171, originally issued by President Carter in 1979. It was published in the Federal Register on April 3, 2025, as 90 FR 14763.

The order affected approximately 67% of the total federal workforce and 75% of currently unionized federal workers — more than one million employees. ² Fully excluded agencies included the Departments of Defense, State, Veterans Affairs, Justice, Energy, and Treasury, along with the EPA, USAID, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, National Science Foundation, International Trade Commission, FCC, and GSA. Partially excluded agencies included Homeland Security (USCIS, ICE, Coast Guard, CISA, FEMA), HHS (CDC, FDA, NIAID), Agriculture (Food Safety and Inspection Service), and all Chief Information Officer offices government-wide. Georgetown University labor historian Joseph McCartin called it “by far the largest single action of union-busting in American history.”

A second executive order, EO 14343, signed August 28, 2025, expanded the exclusions further. ³ This order added NASA, the National Weather Service, NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service, the Patent and Trademark Office, and the U.S. Agency for Global Media. After both orders, 84.4% of the unionized federal workforce — approximately 1.1 million out of 1.3 million union-represented federal employees — lost their collective bargaining rights.

The legal authority cited had historically been used only for narrow, targeted exclusions of genuinely security-focused agencies. ⁴ President Carter first exercised this authority in 1979 to exclude the Defense Intelligence Agency and the GSA’s Information Security Oversight Office. President Reagan excluded specific overseas activities and divisions of the DEA and U.S. Marshals Service. President Bush excluded several DOJ subdivisions in 2002. No prior president had applied this authority to entire cabinet departments or to agencies like the FDA, EPA, or National Science Foundation.

Trump attempted a similar action in 2020, delegating authority to Defense Secretary Mark Esper to eliminate collective bargaining for the Pentagon’s nearly 750,000 civilian employees. ⁵ Esper told the House Armed Services Committee he did not request the authority and was not involved in the decision. A bipartisan group of senators, led by Mark Warner (D-VA) and Susan Collins (R-ME), urged Trump to “reconsider.” Esper elected not to use the authority.

Multiple federal courts initially blocked the order as likely unconstitutional. ⁶ AFGE and allied unions filed suit on April 3, 2025. On June 24, 2025, Judge James Donato of the Northern District of California granted a preliminary injunction, finding in a 29-page order that the executive order was “very likely an illegal, retaliatory attempt to punish federal employee unions for engaging in constitutionally protected speech.” The Ninth Circuit stayed the injunction on July 8, 2025. On February 26, 2026, a three-judge Ninth Circuit panel (opinion by Circuit Judge Daniel Bress) vacated the injunction, finding the order “discloses no retaliatory animus on its face.” However, parallel injunctions in D.C. federal courts (FEA v. Trump and AFL-CIO v. Trump) remained in place as of March 2026. D.C. Circuit oral arguments occurred December 15, 2025, with decisions pending.

The Office of Personnel Management directed agencies to begin terminating collective bargaining agreements. ⁷ OPM issued implementation guidance on March 27, 2025, directing covered agencies to “cease participating” in procedures addressed in collective bargaining agreements that do not align with administration priorities. By February 2026, the IRS had terminated its national agreement with the National Treasury Employees Union, covering thousands of employees. The VA, EPA, FEMA, USCIS, and food safety agencies also cancelled agreements.

Strong Inferences

The national security justification is a legal pretext for a broader anti-union agenda consistent with Project 2025. ⁸ The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 explicitly recommended that Congress “consider whether public-sector unions are appropriate in the first place” and proposed stripping bargaining rights at specific agencies on national security grounds — a blueprint the executive order followed and expanded upon. The order’s scope vastly exceeds any plausible definition of “national security work”: the FDA inspects food, the National Weather Service forecasts weather, the Patent and Trademark Office reviews patent applications, and VA nurses treat veterans. Existing law already excluded employees “engaged in intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or security work which directly affects national security” (5 U.S.C. Section 7112(b)(6)). Genuine security agencies — CIA, NSA, FBI — were already excluded. Notably, Customs and Border Protection, whose officers arguably do the most direct border security work, was not included in the order.

The timing and scope reveal this as workforce restructuring infrastructure rather than a national security measure. ⁹ The order was issued during the same period that DOGE was driving mass federal layoffs — approximately 200,000 federal workers had left their jobs by August 2025, and 300,000 layoffs had been announced in total. Stripping collective bargaining rights removed the primary legal mechanism through which unions could challenge mass layoffs, office relocations, telework eliminations, and unilateral changes to working conditions. Without CBAs, agencies could implement DOGE-directed restructuring without negotiating.

The administration presented no evidence that collective bargaining impeded national security. ¹⁰ The White House fact sheet and the executive order itself cite no specific incidents, no operational failures, and no data demonstrating that union contracts compromised any security mission. Legal scholars at Justia documented that the administration’s empirical justification relied on “misleading” data from a partisan report that misrepresented arbitration’s impact on performance management. The Civil Service Reform Act already provided agencies with mechanisms to override CBAs in emergencies and to declare proposals non-negotiable if they impacted security.

What the Evidence Shows

Executive Order 14251 was real, and the legal authority it invoked is real. Section 7103(b)(1) does grant the President power to exclude agencies from collective bargaining on national security grounds. But between the narrow statutory text and the sweeping action taken, there lies an ocean of bad faith.

The statute requires that excluded agencies have a “primary function” of intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work. For the CIA, this is self-evident. For the National Weather Service, the Patent and Trademark Office, or VA nurses, it defies ordinary language. The White House’s own categorization — stretching “national security” to encompass “pandemic preparedness,” “economic defense,” and “public safety” — is a confession that the statutory text cannot bear the weight placed upon it. Under this logic, virtually any government function could be classified as national security.

The timeline tells the real story. The order arrived two months into a presidency defined by DOGE-driven mass layoffs, telework bans, and agency restructuring. Stripping bargaining rights from two-thirds of the federal workforce removed the primary legal obstacle to unilateral management action. This was not about making the border more secure — CBP officers were not even included. It was about making federal employees more vulnerable to the upheaval already underway.

The courts initially agreed. Judge Donato found the order was likely “retaliatory” — targeting unions that had challenged administration actions in court while leaving unions that supported the administration alone. The Ninth Circuit reversed on procedural grounds (finding no facial animus in the order’s text), but the merits litigation continues, and D.C. courts have maintained their injunctions. The legal question remains genuinely contested.

The Bottom Line

The claim is literally true: the President signed an executive order exempting agencies from collective bargaining requirements, and the order invokes national security as its basis. But the framing is deeply misleading on two dimensions. First, calling these “agencies with national security missions” obscures the fact that the order affected the vast majority of the federal workforce, including weather forecasters, patent examiners, food inspectors, and hospital nurses — employees whose primary functions are not intelligence, counterintelligence, or national security by any conventional definition. Second, claiming the purpose was to “bolster border, national, and energy security” provides no mechanism connecting the removal of union bargaining rights to improved security outcomes — and the administration has presented none. The most direct beneficiary of the order was not national security but executive power: the ability to restructure, relocate, and terminate federal employees without negotiating.

This is the largest action to strip collective bargaining rights from American workers in U.S. history, affecting over a million people. Placing it in the “military force” section as if it were a readiness measure, when it primarily eliminated workplace protections for civilian federal employees, is a category of misdirection all its own.

Footnotes

1. Executive Order 14251, “Exclusions from Federal Labor-Management Relations Programs,” 90 FR 14763 (April 3, 2025). White House, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/exclusions-from-federal-labor-management-relations-programs/ ↩

2. Government Executive, “Trump Order Aims to Outlaw Most Government Unions on ‘National Security’ Grounds,” March 27, 2025. https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2025/03/trump-order-aims-outlaw-most-government-unions-national-security-grounds/404113/; Center for American Progress, “The Trump Administration Ended Collective Bargaining for 1 Million Federal Workers,” September 2025. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-trump-administration-ended-collective-bargaining-for-1-million-federal-workers/ ↩

3. Federal News Network, “Trump Orders More Agencies to Nix Collective Bargaining Agreements,” August 28, 2025. https://federalnewsnetwork.com/unions/2025/08/trump-orders-more-agencies-to-nix-collective-bargaining-agreements/ ↩

4. Congressional Research Service, “National Security Exclusions from the Federal Service Labor-Management Relations Statutes,” LSB11367. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB11367 ↩

5. Government Executive, “Trump Order Aims to Outlaw Most Government Unions on ‘National Security’ Grounds,” March 27, 2025; Federal Times, “Lawmakers Oppose Trump Move to Cut Union Bargaining for DoD Feds,” February 27, 2020. https://www.federaltimes.com/congress/2020/02/27/lawmakers-oppose-trump-move-to-cut-union-bargaining-for-dod-feds/ ↩

6. Federal News Network, “Appeals Court Axes Injunction on Trump’s Collective Bargaining Rollback,” February 26, 2026. https://federalnewsnetwork.com/workforce/2026/02/appeals-courts-axes-injunction-on-trumps-collective-bargaining-rollback/; AFGE, “AFGE Victory: Judge Blocks Trump’s Attempt to Strip Union Rights from a Million Feds.” https://www.afge.org/article/afge-victory-judge-blocks-trumps-attempt-to-strip-union-rights-from-a-million-feds/ ↩

7. Federal News Network, “IRS Rescinds Collective Bargaining Agreement with Its Largest Union,” February 2026. https://federalnewsnetwork.com/unions/2026/02/irs-rescinds-its-collective-bargaining-agreement-with-nteu/ ↩

8. Government Executive, “Federal Collective Bargaining Is in the U.S. National Interest,” August 28, 2025. https://www.govexec.com/management/2025/08/federal-collective-bargaining-us-national-interest/407791/; 5 U.S.C. Section 7112(b)(6). ↩

9. Center for American Progress, “The Trump Administration Ended Collective Bargaining for 1 Million Federal Workers,” September 2025; Wikipedia, “2025 United States Federal Mass Layoffs.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_federal_mass_layoffs ↩

10. Justia Verdict, “There’s No There There: The Trump Administration’s Use of Misleading Empirical Evidence,” July 17, 2025. https://verdict.justia.com/2025/07/17/theres-no-there-there-the-trump-administrations-use-of-misleading-empirical-evidence-to-end-collective-bargaining-for-most-federal-employees; Government Executive, “Federal Collective Bargaining Is in the U.S. National Interest,” August 2025. ↩