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House Republicans Join Effort To Repeal Trump’s Union-Busting Executive Order

A group of moderate Republicans has teamed up with House Democrats to force a vote on blocking President Donald Trump from stripping union rights from federal workers.

The bill from Reps. Jared Golden (D-Maine) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) would overturn Trump’s executive order nullifying collective bargaining agreements covering hundreds of thousands of workers — what Golden called “the single biggest act of union-busting in American history.”

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Although Republicans control the chamber, a majority of House members — 218 — have signed onto a legislative maneuver known as a discharge petition to force the bill out of committee. Under House rules, the measure must come to a vote on the full House floor within seven legislative days.

It is the same maneuver Republicans and Democrats have used to thwart House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and advance a bill compelling the Justice Department to release files related to late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The union legislation is unlikely to go anywhere in the GOP-controlled Senate, but its movement in the House is a sign that not all Republicans are on board with the president’s attacks on federal unions. Trump is trying to throw out union contracts as his administration has pushed an estimated 200,000 federal employees off the payroll through layoffs and early retirements.

Fitzpatrick was joined by four other Republicans in signing the petition: Don Bacon (Neb.), Rob Bresnahan (Pa.), Nick LaLota (N.Y.) and Mike Lawler (N.Y.).

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Golden, who launched the petition effort in June, said in a statement Monday that he was proud of the “bipartisan coalition” behind it, and thanked LaLota and Lawler for getting the signatories to a majority on Tuesday.

“America never voted to eliminate workers’ union rights, and the strong bipartisan support for my bill shows that Congress will not stand idly by while President Trump nullifies federal workers’ collective bargaining agreements and rolls back generations of labor law,” he said.

The AFL-CIO labor federation has estimated that Trump’s order would strip union rights from around 400,000 federal workers at agencies such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Justice and much of the Agriculture Department.

The stated rationale for the rollback is that the employees work primarily in “intelligence” or “national security,” even though many of them — including nurses and scientists — clearly have nothing to do with those functions. The leader of a federal union at the Bureau of Land Management, which is included in Trump’s order, told HuffPost earlier this year that the justification was absurd.

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“Some of my members are park rangers, recreation specialists, botanists,” she explained. “We’re not national security. We don’t engage in counterintelligence.”

Unions have filed lawsuits aimed at blocking the order, arguing Trump’s move is retaliatory and unlawful. They noted that the administration made clear in issuing the order that the president viewed federal unions as a political enemy, claiming they had “declared war on President Trump’s agenda.”

Liz Shuler, the AFL-CIO’s president, said in a statement that Trump’s cuts to the federal workforce were already hurting government services, citing staffing shortages at veterans hospitals and weakened disaster response.

“Working people built a bipartisan coalition to restore union rights to federal workers in the face of unprecedented attacks on our freedoms,” Shuler said. [B]ut the fight isn’t over.”