Federal unions got caught standing still: Federal workers face the consequences

If you’re a federal employee who assumed your union saw this coming, you’re owed an explanation. The ground has shifted under every federal worker — jobs cut, civil-service rules in flux, once-dominant unions now fighting for survival, undone by a few strokes of a pen.

Federal unions have real workplace wins to their name; the harder question is how the civil service became this exposed on their watch. Any focus on the American Federation of Government Employees here reflects direct experience and its role as the largest federal union — a stand-in for the broader trend.

The executive orders (EOs) were merely the catalyst. The vulnerabilities were decades in the making: reliance on political allies, fragmented organization, no preparation for a hostile administration. This isn’t about bad faith — it’s institutional complacency. That demands a reckoning, and this account draws on a decade representing federal employees and unions.

The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 established the modern federal labor-management framework. It has remained unchanged even as the politics and workplaces it governs have not. Past administrations have used its national security “carveout” to exclude employees, and the 2025 EOs confirmed the vulnerability: That carveout was always one election from becoming labor policy. Unions long relied on stopgap rules and agreements — rather than pressing Congress to make civil service protections difficult to dismantle.

Union finances followed the same arc. Trump’s first term exposed that vulnerability; afterward it was business as usual, including reliance on payroll-deducted dues. AFGE built an alternative, but it did not gain ample traction. Unions again failed to plan for a loss of government support. When the 2025 EOs cut payroll dues and other support, AFGE’s reported membership fell from about 321,000 in early 2025 to about 130,000 by mid-2025, before rebounding to 225,000 by December 2025, including 14,542 retirees. Staff fell from roughly 355 employees to 151. The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) reported a similar squeeze. These losses were foreseeable — yet unions were left scrambling.

There’s also a long-avoided deficit: the gap between total bargaining unit employees (BUEs) — everyone a union represents, dues-paying or not — and those who pay dues. Federal law requires representing every BUE and grants paid official time for it. AFGE says it represents 820,000 BUEs, but Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS) filings and my experience suggest that about a third pay dues — consistent with Labor Department findings that 32.9% of BUEs join public unions — and it’s far fewer at some locals (the exception being some law enforcement groups).

Because the law required unions to represent every BUE regardless of membership, they rarely had to keep earning that right — only claim it. A dues-paying minority controlling representation became normal, not a warning sign. When the orders hit, that passive majority vanished — along with the resources it may have provided.

There is another uncomfortable issue: documented criminal convictions involving union officials. An America First Policy Institute (AFPI) review of OLMS records identified 619 union-official convictions from May 2012 through May 2022, including 64 involving AFGE — 10.3% of the total. AFPI calculated that share as disproportionately high relative to AFGE’s membership. The figure is not an OLMS corruption rate or ranking, but it does raise questions about union accountability. OLMS records also show substantially more convictions in the 1990s and early 2000s than in recent years, although those figures cannot establish a historical corruption rate because OLMS does not provide a consistent denominator of union officials.

Still, specific cases in the media are startling. A secretary to AFGE’s national communications director pleaded guilty in 2021 to embezzling more than $275,000. AFGE’s national president resigned in 2020 amid allegations of sexual harassment and misused funds. NTEU has faced less scrutiny, though one report alleged $100,000 missing from a local. An AFGE Local 2053 president pleaded guilty to wire fraud in 2025; an AFGE Local 1745 president pleaded guilty to false statements in 2026.

Each case stands on its own, and none alone proves national misconduct. But together, they demand an answer to a question BUEs have asked me directly: What are national leaders doing about this? Is it a blind spot — or one they tolerate as long as the dues keep flowing?

The list of missteps is too long for one article, but a few more stand out: Unions ignored the contract workforce despite its bearing on federal staffing and congressional funding; let political differences override union interests — AFGE’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement unions split over ideological differences, and AFGE took a politically costly position during the government shutdown in October 2025; and overlooked mission-aligned allies like Social Security and veterans’ advocates. Most baffling, they never made an effective public case that unions protect public service, not just employees — allowing opponents to brand them defenders of bureaucracy.

Beyond the above, unions never built a unified federal coalition to meet an existential threat, even as they competed for the same BUEs and grew tied to partisan politics. These unions have been around for decades; “We didn’t know” isn’t a credible excuse. As of my departure, in 2025, they hadn’t fixed outdated bargaining unit certifications, a gap that can be exploited.

The through-line isn’t a mystery, it’s inertia: A model built on outdated practices and a legally unsteady advantage holds only until it’s tested. In 2025, it was.

Litigation may be necessary, but it’s expensive, slow and no guarantee. Most cases are pending with no predictable timeline. Workplace rules keep changing in ways that will reshape federal labor for years. And there’s no report of senior union officers taking pay cuts in solidarity with fired employees: OLMS filings show AFGE’s president’s pay climbed to $228,703 in 2025 — the same year payroll dues deductions were cut.

That raises a question: Have unions adjusted, or are they running the same old playbook? A Defense Department memo sent to DoD unions — shared with me — shows the government is postured for a long fight. The union response so far: join, we’ll sue, send more money. Federal unions risk sounding like a campaign running on past wins while workers tread water. Some union leaders have taken to publishing their own retrospectives — which, as a matter of public record, read more like highlight reels than roadmaps.

None of this should comfort agencies: When functioning unions disappear, workplace disputes don’t vanish — they turn chaotic, simmer, or go to formal channels, slower and costlier than the phone-call fixes agencies got for free.

Unions need change. It starts with new leaders — not those on watch while this happened, still recycling the same ideas. Then representation must be adapted, including fee restructuring amid limited bargaining; senior staff hires and where they should sit (in the field at locals, not at HQ); election transparency; and advocacy beyond the bargaining table. Labor law needs to change: BUEs at any local should be able to change unions more easily once BUE majority support is lost, and the national security exemption needs guardrails. Unions may say no to the first point, but this is not about their survival; it’s about the civil servants.

I’ll never forget a conversation with a union steward at an AFGE National Convention. He recalled a union official saying unions can only react. There’s a quote from an unknown author: ‘A leader who only reacts is like a captain who only turns the wheel after hitting the iceberg.’ Unions hit the iceberg.

Credit where it’s due: The carve-out was a brilliant move — sources close to various union leaderships indicated it was coming after the 2024 election. Yet the union scramble didn’t start until later. Federal employees are living with the consequences — not the leaders whose OLMS filings show them pulling top dollar from the dues members pay.

The federal workforce remains one of this country’s institutional strengths — the people unions exist to serve. Those employees are caught in the middle of a political war, paying the price for a union that lost sight of what matters — the civil servants.

Javier Soto is an attorney. The views expressed are the author’s own, drawn from personal experience representing federal employees and unions, including five years as a legal rights attorney at AFGE District 14.

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