President Donald Trump signed a memo Friday targeting union contracts brokered during the final days of the previous administration.
Trump directed agencies to disapprove collective bargaining agreements reached 30 days prior to a presidential changeover. After the election, several federal unions raced to wrap up contracts with the Biden administration to protect telework and remote work for their members as well as extend them past Trump’s second term.
Those agreements could complicate Trump’s push to bring federal employees to the office full time and have stoked anger among Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
“Such last-minute, lame-duck CBAs, which purport to bind a new President to his predecessor’s policies, run counter to America’s system of democratic self-government,” Trump said in the memo for agency and department heads.
Such contracts, often reached after years of negotiation between agencies and their unions, carry the force of law. Trump’s order is likely to be challenged in court.
The move comes as the Trump administration is pushing massive cuts to the federal workforce, including by offering most federal employees the chance to resign from their jobs with the promise of pay and benefits through September.
Trump said of federal workers Friday, “Everybody is replaceable,” according to a White House pool report. He added, “We’d love to have them leave. It’s our dream to have everyone work in the private sector. … Biden let them get away with murder.”
Deregulation order
Trump signed a second executive order Friday aimed at cutting back on federal rules.
The order, titled “Unleashing prosperity through deregulation,” marks an attempt to follow through on Trump’s campaign-trail promise to slash 10 regulations for each new rule put on the books.
“The ever-expanding morass of complicated Federal regulation imposes massive costs on the lives of millions of Americans, creates a substantial restraint on our economic growth and ability to build and innovate, and hampers our global competitiveness,” the order says.
The order also decrees that for fiscal 2025, “the total incremental cost of all new regulations, including repealed regulations” must be “significantly less than zero,” according to a fact sheet issued by the White House.
