Trump signs EO 14251 stripping collective bargaining rights from 40+ federal agencies on pretextual national security grounds

On March 27, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14251, "Exclusions from Federal Labor-Management Relations Programs," invoking the national security exception in the Federal Service Labor-Management Relations Statute (FSLMRS) to strip collective bargaining rights from more than 40 federal agencies and subdivisions — including the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Environmental Protection Agency. The FSLMRS, enacted by Congress under 5 U.S.C. Chapter 71, grants most federal employees the right to organize and bargain collectively; the statute contains a national security carve-out that the Trump administration applied wholesale to agencies whose primary missions are consumer protection, public health, and environmental regulation.

The breadth of the "national security" invocation was immediately contested. The national security exception in the FSLMRS was designed for agencies with genuine intelligence or counterintelligence functions — not for agencies whose workforces primarily consist of scientists, lawyers, and public health professionals. Unions representing affected workers, including the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), and the AFL-CIO, filed legal challenges in the weeks following the order's issuance, arguing that the administration had stretched the statutory exception far beyond its intended scope.

EO 14251 became the enabling legal authority for a cascade of agency-level de-recognition actions that followed throughout 2025. On August 6, VA Secretary Doug Collins used the order to terminate collective bargaining agreements covering roughly 80% of the Department of Veterans Affairs' 400,000-person workforce. On August 22, the Department of Health and Human Services de-recognized all union contracts at the CDC, FDA, and other HHS divisions. On August 28, EO 14343 extended the exclusions to NASA, the National Weather Service, and the Patent and Trademark Office. Taken together, the campaign stripped hundreds of thousands of federal workers of collectively bargained protections through executive action rather than legislation, bypassing the statutory framework Congress had established for decades.