By Joe Davidson · The Washington Post (c) 2025
President Donald Trump overwhelmed federal workers with shock and fear immediately upon taking office with directives that shut long-standing government programs, closed offices without notice and stripped workplace protections for many.
Now those feelings have turned to anger and activism – with federal employees leading actions over working conditions, and also more broadly against Trump’s aggressive presidential power grab that has generated a constitutional crisis alarm. Instead of pushing parochial compensation concerns, today federal employees are keenly focused on stopping Trump’s unprecedented power heist.
From his first days in office, Trump pushed federal employees to the vanguard of the broad resistance against his aggressive actions, including moving to firefederal employees, stopping staffers from carrying out missions approved by Congress, subverting union contracts, and killing diversity, equity and inclusion in the federal workplace.
Meanwhile, layoffs are ramping up across the government in a purge orchestrated by Elon Musk’s pseudo-governmental U.S. DOGE Service. Trump’s executive order issued Tuesday requires, with some exceptions, agencies to “hire no more than one employee for every four employees that depart.”
Over time, and at least in theory, that could lead to an unimaginably severe workforce reduction in most agencies, harshly shackling the government’s capacity to service the people.
Federal union membership is jumping because of Trump. That bolsters feds on the forefront of a growing fight against Trump’s steamrolling, unilateral approach. The many federal union lawsuits have found some temporary judicial success against Trump’s orders, provided troops for anti-Trump rallies and platforms for Democrats to denounce his actions.
Curiously, Trump has not yet reissued his three May 2018 executive orders that sharply cut the abilities of federal labor organizations to represent employees. Those directives were prime examples of his federal employee antagonism in his first term. American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) President Everett Kelley said during an interview that he expects they will be issued “in short order.” The White House did not answer questions for this report. Trump has said his actions are needed to rein in a bloated bureaucracy that he blames for blocking some of his actions in his first term.
During the AFGE annual legislative conference this week, including in a packed hotel ballroom on Monday and during a large rally across from the Capitol Building on Tuesday, a long line of senators, representatives, union leaders and civil rights activists didn’t focus on demands for greater pay and benefits’ protection, as was the usual fare in previous years’ gatherings.
Rather, Trump’s power push was a central focus. Notably, the rally, held in frigid weather with a snowstorm looming, was much larger this year, with many more demonstrators, police, news cameras and so many prominent people wanting to speak that some had to double and triple up at the microphone to save time.
“As a union, we have a responsibility to stand up for our members’ rights and our contracts,” Kelley said. “But we have a broader mission, too, to stand up for the integrity of our government and the services our members provide.”
But if Trump’s one-for-four workforce reduction plan leads to its logical conclusion, it “will have an immediate and devastating impact” on federal programs including “health care, child care, veterans benefits, Social Security benefits, Meals on Wheels, Head Start, our national parks, cancer research, student loans, farm payments, and a myriad of others services in red and blue communities alike,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (Va.), the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “America won’t look like America if this wrecking ball wields it reckless destruction.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) ignited the union crowd at the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill with a fiery lesson on constitutional law. He called Trump’s actions a “full blown assault on the constitutional order.”
Instead of presidential primacy, Raskin, who taught constitutional law at American University, claimed that position for Congress, noting the Constitution covers the legislative branch first in Article I, while the much shorter Article II is about the presidency. Congress has the power to impeach the president, and “he doesn’t have the power to impeach us,” Raskin said.
“The reason Congress is in Article I,” he explained to cheers, is “we had a revolution against a king, against a monarch, against the autocrats and the plutocrats,” referring to the president.
Trump, however, rests his power plays on Article II’s first sentence, which says “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” In 2019, during Trump’s first term, he was clear on his strongly disputed, unique interpretation of that line: “I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” That’s his version of the unitary executive theory, which has right-wing support. Conservatives associated with the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society did not respond to questions about it and Trump’s actions.
Donald Moynihan, a University of Michigan public policy professor, said “such a power would be too great in the hands of any president, but it is a constitutional threat when the White House is occupied by a felon who is using his presidency to amass power and engage in retribution. The people surrounding Trump are making confident assertions of power – to fire civil servants, to block appropriations, to shut down agencies – that are clearly illegal.”
Raskin pointed to the Constitution’s “core duty of the president” to “take care that the laws are faithfully executed, not frustrated, not defeated, not rewritten, not overturned … we’re going to defend the constitutional prerogatives of Congress, and we’re going to defend the civil service rights and the First Amendment rights of federal workers in America.”
Another Maryland Democrat at the hotel session, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, declared “we are facing a constitutional crisis like we’ve not seen for a very long time in the United States of America, because as we speak, we see President Trump and Elon Musk trying to tear down what it took this country well over a century to build, and that is the merit based civil service system.”
But White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said talk of a constitutional crisis is an “extremely dishonest narrative” and media “fearmongering.” At Wednesday’s White House briefing, she said the real crisis is among judges who “are abusing their power” by blocking Trump’s executive orders with at least 12 injunctions against them in two weeks.
Federal District Judge Carl J. Nichols is one of those judges. He temporarily blocked Trump’s action forcing thousands of U.S. Agency for International Development workers on leave in a lawsuit filed by two federal unions, the American Foreign Service Association and AFGE.
Trump appointed Nichols.