How the Dissolution of Federal Unions Could Transform Public Administration

Author: Dr. Terry Acie

Keywords: Federal Unions, Public Administration, Collective Bargaining, Federal Workforce, Public Sector Unions

Introduction

Labor unions in the United States have played an important role in the daily operations and management of how employees are treated, paid, and managed in the federal workspace. Federal employees in a selection of specific grade ranges have been able to participate in labor unions for a relatively small amount of union dues. These organizations, up until the transition of the Trump Administration, have played a pivotal role in safeguarding employees from unsafe work conditions and provided an extra layer of job security. The purpose of this article is to highlight how the reduction and/or elimination of federal unions impacts public administration without focusing on one specific cabinet-level organization.

President Donald J. Trump’s Executive Order 14251, titled “Exclusions from Federal Labor-Management Relations Programs,” signed into effect on March 27, 2025, was the first step in removing and reducing federal unionization from public servants. The order excluded more than 40 federal agencies and subdivisions from federal labor-management relations statutes, effectively ending collective bargaining rights for a large portion of the unionized federal workforce (FederalRegister.gov, 2025). However, debates surrounding the role and influence of unions in government institutions have intensified post-Trump 47’s inauguration.

The federal mandate to remove or modify federal unions such as the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents over 820,000 federal employees (AFGE at a Glance, 2015), should raise questions for public administration scholars over how management and disputes are resolved between the organization and the employee. What are the implications public administrations face as they address the repercussions management will need to overcome in the future of the organization?

Historical Role of Federal Unions in Public Administration

Unionization in the federal government within the twentieth century became an institutional component of many organizations. The catalyst was EO 10988 signed by John F. Kennedy to allow unions in federal service. The keystone legislation was the Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA) of 1978, which established collective bargaining frameworks for public administrators (Freeman & Han, 2012).

The CSRA also placed limitations on the unions, which prohibited them from influencing wages and performing labor strikes. Public administrators are represented by these unions mostly for working conditions, grievances, and workplace policies. The American Federation of Government Employees and the National Treasury Employees Union represent the largest segments of unionization in the federal workforce, covering agencies such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, and the Department of Defense.

From a public administration perspective, unions have functioned as institutional gatekeepers that help balance management’s authority with employee protections. These organizations help shape and influence the governance of federal bureaucracies.

Managerial Authority and Organizational Efficiency

When union dissolution took effect after EO 14251, a shift in managerial authority took effect, and the safeguards that once provided employee protection eroded (McCartin, 2026). Without collective bargaining frameworks, federal agencies such as the Veterans Affairs could potentially exercise greater autonomy in personnel decisions, workforce restructuring, and performance management without facing the scrutiny that comes through a labor union. The executive order, as of August 2026, is part of ongoing litigation regarding its legitimacy and legality.

The Trump administration and the supporters of the reduction and elimination of unions from federal service argue that this change would increase organizational effectiveness and improve efficiency (Glock, 2025). Trump’s Saving the Civil Service Act looks to remove cumbersome union policies so that federal management can implement policy reforms, restructure programs, and adjust workforce policies more quickly, but as the buffer between administration and employee reduces, employee advocacy decreases. McCartin (2026) argues that this reduction is the largest singular episode of union busting in America’s history and jeopardizes the effectiveness of public administration.

Within the lens of public administration, reducing union influence aligns with New Public Management (NPM), which emphasizes managerial autonomy, performance, and efficiency. This gives greater autonomy for individual federal organizations to make changes that are unique to their service. The NPM paradigm elevates efficiency over social service.

For public administrators, a fundamental question to ask is: How much employee security should be sacrificed to give federal agencies greater flexibility to implement policy reforms, restructure programs, and realign the workforce with changing priorities?

Workforce Protections and Institutional Trust

While increased managerial authority within federal agencies may improve administrative flexibility and policy manipulation, the absence of union representation could also raise concerns regarding employee protections and institutional trust. This trust can extend into how US citizens perceive federal administration fairness.

Union enrollment within the US federal government has historically been higher than that of the private sector (Federman et al., 2025) and has advocated for procedural fairness in personnel administration, which includes discipline, grievances, and labor disputes. Employees within the federal workspace regard these institutional safeguards as mechanisms to reduce vulnerability in adverse personnel actions that management could unilaterally make without consultation.

The opposite paradigm to NPM is New Public Administration. Scholars who dedicate their collective intellect towards New Public Administration (NPA) scholarship emphasize that government institutions must balance efficiency with fairness, equity, and democratic values (Federman et al., 2025). From an NPA perspective, unions contribute to administrative legitimacy by ensuring that employee voices remain part of organizational decision-making processes when deciding how organizational personnel actions are executed. The NPA paradigm elevates social advocacy over efficiency and economy.

Policy Implementation and Organizational Culture

Changes to union structures may also influence the broader culture of federal agencies when assessing how these changes affect organizational culture. Organizational culture is measured annually through two surveys administered yearly for all federal employees to partake in and express their satisfiers and dissatisfiers in their organization. The Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey and the All Employee Survey assess workplace culture among several other areas of emphasis in federal service (Daley, 2017). The Trump administration’s re-election bid has found job satisfaction taking a large dip in metrics, largely due to policy implementations (Favero et al., 2026). Organizational culture plays a critical role in shaping how policies are implemented and how employees interact with leadership. The reduction of employee safeguards further weakens the culture.

Union representation often provides a formal channel for communication between employees and management. If unions were dissolved or significantly weakened, agencies would need to develop alternative mechanisms for gathering employee feedback and resolving workplace disputes.

Effective administrative leadership through established human resource mechanisms would therefore require new strategies for maintaining workforce engagement, transparency, and collaboration.

Implications for Public Administration Research

The evolving role of federal unions presents an important research opportunity for scholars studying government institutions. Changes to labor relations structures could influence numerous aspects of public administration, including workforce performance, organizational culture, employee retention, and policy implementation outcomes.

For researchers, this issue raises a few key questions for federal executives to consider:

How do changes in union representation influence federal employee productivity?
What alternative governance mechanisms can protect employee rights while maintaining administrative efficiency?
How do workforce governance reforms affect employee morale and institutional trust?

Answering these questions will be critical for understanding the long-term implications of labor relations reforms within federal institutions.

Conclusion

The structure of the federal workforce plays a central role in determining how government institutions deliver services to the public. Federal employees and politicians must remember that the public is the customer. Changes to union representation could reshape the balance between managerial authority and employee protections across federal agencies, which would impact critical services public administrators provide to the republic.

For public administration scholars and practitioners, these developments highlight the importance of examining how institutional reforms affect both organizational performance and democratic governance.

As federal workforce policies continue to evolve, the continuous effort by scholars in the public administration and policy field has growing opportunities to examine and provide valuable research to the discussion surrounding federal union representation. This

References

AFGE at a Glance. (2015, April 22). https://www.afge.org/about-us/afge-at-a-glance/

Daley, D. M. (2017). Job satisfaction versus job engagement: A comparative analysis on perceptions of accountability and turnover. International Journal of Organization Theory & Behavior, 20(2), 161–192. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJOTB-20-02-2017-B002

Exclusions From Federal Labor-Management Relations Programs. (2025, April 3). Federal Register. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/04/03/2025-05836/exclusions-from-federal-labor-management-relations-programs

Favero, N., Flink, C., & Qu, T. (2026). US Federal Budgets and Federal Employee Job Satisfaction. Public Budgeting & Finance, n/a(n/a). https://doi.org/10.1111/pbaf.70015

Federman, P. S., Viswanath, S., & Riccucci, N. M. (2025). Public Sector Collective Bargaining: A Meta-Review. Review of Public Personnel Administration, 45(2), 309–332. https://doi.org/10.1177/0734371X231216946

Freeman, R. B., & Han, E. (2012). The War Against Public Sector Collective Bargaining in the US. Journal of Industrial Relations, 54(3), 386–408. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022185612442279

Glock, J. (2025). Radical Civil Service Reform Is Not Radical: https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/radical-civil-service-reform-is-not-radical-lessons-for-the-federal-government-from-the-states.pdf

McCartin, J. A. (2026). Assessing Donald Trump’s Federal Workers Union Bloodbath. New Labor Forum, 35(2), 22–31. https://doi.org/10.1177/10957960261437070