Highlights:
Washington Post: Trump’s 2017 Budget Proposal Called For “Culling Back Numerous Programs And Expediting A Historic Contraction Of The Federal Workforce.” According to the Washington Post, “President Trump’s budget proposal this week would shake the federal government to its core if enacted, culling back numerous programs and expediting a historic contraction of the federal workforce.” [Washington Post, 3/12/17]
Trump’s Budget Cuts Would Have Been The Largest Drawdown In The Federal Workforce Since The Conclusion Of World War II. According to the Washington Post, “President Trump’s budget proposal this week would shake the federal government to its core if enacted, culling back numerous programs and expediting a historic contraction of the federal workforce. This would be the first time the government has executed cuts of this magnitude — and all at once — since the drawdown following World War II, economists and budget analysts said.” [Washington Post, 3/12/17]
Trump’s Budget Was Expected To Result In Staffing Cuts To Housing And Urban Development, The Environment, Government Research, And Foreign Assistance. According to New York Magazine, “President Trump is expected to propose his budget this week and the severe cuts to non-military discretionary spending could result in a wave of pink slips in D.C., the Washington Post reports. Trump’s budget, which is not final, will reflect his campaign promises to make the ‘military so big, so powerful, so strong, that nobody — absolutely nobody — is going to mess with us.’ But to offset the $54 billion increase in military spending he will seek, Trump will ask for cuts in spending on housing, the environment, government research, and foreign assistance. The requested cuts, which will need Congressional approval to become law, are expected to be so deep that one expert told the Post they will lead to an employment reduction of 1.8 percent in the D.C. area and a 3.5 percent drop in personal income.” [New York Magazine, 3/13/17]
Trump’s Federal Workforce Cuts Were Expected To Affect Civil Service Roles Including Those Who List Endangered Species, Collect Taxes, And Distribute Aid To Foreign Countries. According to the Washington Post, “Employees who list endangered species, collect taxes and distribute aid to foreign countries are fearing for their livelihoods as they sift through rumors and wait to see whether their offices will be targeted for steep reductions.” [Washington Post, 3/1/17]
Proposed Cuts To The EPA By The Trump Administration Would Reduce The EPA’s Workforce By One-Fifth Over One Year. According to The Washington Post, “The White House has proposed deep cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget that would reduce the agency’s staff by one-fifth in the first year and eliminate dozens of programs, according to details of a plan reviewed by The Washington Post.” [Washington Post, 3/1/17]
Trump’s Budget Cuts Called To Reduce The Size Of The Diplomatic Corps. According to the Associated Press, “The State Department had already been bracing for budget cuts under the Trump administration. Many of its bureaus went through exercises to see how they could function with 20 percent or 25 percent less money, officials said. Buyouts could help reduce the size of the diplomatic corps along with early retirements and layoffs, they found. Eliminating special envoy and special representative positions could also yield savings. Only 11 of 32 special envoy or representative posts that existed during the Obama administration are currently filled.” [Associated Press, 3/3/17]
Trump’s Budget Would Have Cut HUD Salaries And Administrative Expenses By 5%. According to the Washington Post, “HUD salaries and administrative expenses will be cut by 5 percent, down from $1.36 billion in 2016 to $1.28 billion in 2018. It is not yet clear how that reduction in staff or wages would be achieved.” [Washington Post, 3/8/17]
Trump Called For A 14% Cut To The IRS. According to the Washington Post, “Over the last few years, the IRS was the target of punitive budget reductions by Republicans angry over agency misdeeds. About 17,000 IRS jobs have been eliminated since 2010, NTEU said. The Trump administration plans a 14 percent IRS cut, The New York Times reported.” [Washington Post, 3/2/17]
Trump’s Budget Proposal Eliminated VIPR Teams, Highly Trained, Uniformed Agents That Sweep Airports, Train Stations And Bus Terminals To Guard Against Terrorist Attacks. According to the Washington Post, “An additional $57 million would be saved by cutting a program that sends armed teams of highly trained, uniformed agents to sweep airports, train stations and bus terminals. Commonly known as the VIPR teams (for Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response), they were deployed to Reagan National Airport, Washington Dulles International Airport, Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport, Amtrak’s Union Station and D.C.-area subway stations to guard against terrorist attacks during Trump’s inauguration.” [Washington Post, 3/8/17]
Washington Post: About One-Third Of Civilian Federal Employees Are Veterans. According to the Washington Post, “And veterans won’t just lose out on decent services thanks to this hiring freeze; they’ll also lose out on jobs. About one-third of civilian federal employees are veterans, thanks in part to the preference given to qualified veterans in government hiring, and out-of-work veterans will be hit particularly hard by this measure.” [Washington Post, 1/25/17]
Black Workers Would Be Disproportionately Affected By Trump’s Cuts To The Federal Workforce, As 18.1% Of Federal Employees Are Black Compared To 10.4% In The Civilian Workforce At Large. According to the Huffington Post, “If Trump and his fellow Republicans achieve all these austerity goals, there’s one group that will pay a higher price for it than others: black workers. That’s because the federal government disproportionately employs African-Americans. In fiscal year 2014, 18.1 percent of federal employees ― or nearly one in every five ― were black, according to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. That’s a significantly higher rate than in the civilian workforce at large, where 10.4 percent of workers were black during the same period.” [Huffington Post, 1/5/17]
Trump’s 2019 Budget Proposal Called For Cuts To Retirement Benefits For Federal Workers. According to Vox, “President Donald Trump’s grand vision for America in 2020 can be summarized this way: spend billions more dollars on the US military and immigration enforcement; cut billions of dollars from the social safety net. And do nothing to close the $1 trillion deficit Republicans created with their 2017 corporate tax cuts. The president’s 2020 budget proposal, which he released Monday, managed to anger everyone from retirees to childhood cancer researchers. It also angered millions of federal employees and retired government workers, who would see their pensions cut under the president’s budget request. […] The proposal would cancel cost-of-living increases to pension income for retirees in one program, and would lower the annual adjustment to another pension program by 0.5 percent. The budget also scraps certain retirement benefits for employees who stop working before they are eligible for Social Security. Current federal employees would also end up paying more for their retirement benefits, without getting anything in return.” [Vox, 3/12/19]
Trump’s Proposed Cuts Would Have Cost Nearly $150 Billion – Or $75,000 Per Federal Worker – From Employees’ Pensions Over A Decade. According to Vox, “All in all, the president wants to cut $148.9 billion from employee pensions in the next decade — roughly $75,000 per federal worker, according to NFFE.” [Vox, 3/12/19]
2018: Trump Scraped A Pay Raise For Federal Workers. According to Politico, “President Donald Trump announced Thursday he was canceling across-the-board pay raises for civilian workers across the federal government, citing the ‘nation’s fiscal situation.’ […] Under Trump’s policy, roughly 1.8 million people wouldn’t get an automatic pay boost next year, including Border Patrol and ICE agents.” [Politico, 8/30/18]
2018: Trump Signed An Executive Order Making It Easier For Fire Federal Employees. According to the New York Times, “The first makes it easier to fire and discipline federal employees, which a senior administration official, who declined to be named on a call with reporters, argued had become a much too lengthy and difficult process. The administration said that it frequently took six months to a year to dismiss a poorly performing employee, followed by an appeals period averaging eight months. To streamline the process, the official said, the executive order will give poor performers only 30 days to demonstrate improvement, rather than the current limit of up to 120 days, depending on the agency. The official said the administration would also make performance a more important factor than seniority when agencies undertake layoffs.” [New York Times, 5/25/18]
2018: Trump Signed An Executive Order Directing Agencies To Renegotiate Contracts With Government Employee Unions. According to the New York Times, “The second executive order directs federal agencies to renegotiate contracts with unions representing government employees so as to reduce waste. The anonymous administration official expressed hope that, for example, agencies could stop having to pay expenses on both sides when unions undertake appeals on behalf of fired workers. Richard Loeb, a senior policy counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees, said appeals were typically handled by union lawyers not paid by the government.” [New York Times, 5/25/18]
2018: Trump Signed An Executive Order Limiting How Much Government Workers With Roles In The Union Could Spend On “Official Time.” According to the New York Times, “The third order aims to cut down on ‘official time,’ in which government workers who have roles in the union, like helping colleagues file grievances, are allowed to perform those roles during normal working hours for which they draw their usual salary. (An analogous concept exists for private-sector unions.) The order limits official time to 25 percent of their hours during the year.” [New York Times, 5/25/18]
Trump’s Orders Also Included A Provision Requiring Federal Agencies To Charge Unions For Space. According to the Washington Post, “The orders also require agencies to begin charging unions for space in federal buildings they now use for free.” [Washington Post, 5/25/18]
AFGE Said Trump’s Orders Were An Attack On Federal Workers. According to the Washington Post, “Public employee unions said that Trump’s orders amounted to an attack on federal workers and that they were contemplating legal action to halt them. ‘President Trump is attempting to silence the voice of veterans, law enforcement officers, and other frontline federal workers through a series of executive orders intended to strip federal employees of their decades-old right to representation at the worksite,’ the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union, said in a statement.” [Washington Post, 5/25/18]
August 2018: A District Judge Invalidated Nine Provisions Of Trump’s Executive Orders. According to the Federal News Network, “In a highly-anticipated decision, a federal district judge invalidated nine provisions of the president’s executive orders on official time, collective bargaining and employee removals, in response to a series of legal challenges from a coalition of federal unions. The decision, which came late Friday night, prevents agencies from implementing or enacting the following provisions of the president’s EOs: The imposition of a 25 percent cap on the use of official time, The prohibition against employees’ right to petition and communicate with Congress, The ban on the use of official time by union representatives to prepare and present grievances, The one-hour per bargaining unit employee formula to be applied to set an aggregate cap on the use of official time, The limitations placed on unions’ use of agency facilities, such as office space and computers, The exclusion of challenges to performance ratings and incentive pay from the scope of the negotiated grievance procedure, The limitation of performance improvement periods (PIPs) to 30 days, with agencies alone having the discretion to apply longer periods, The direction to agencies to press for the exclusion of removals from the scope of the negotiated grievance procedure, and, The prohibition against bargaining over the ‘permissive’ subjects. More than a dozen federal unions, led by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) and National Federation of Government Employees (NFFE), had separately sued the Trump administration over the president’s executive orders, which the administration released May 25, earlier this summer.” [Federal News Network, 8/25/18]
July 2019: An Appeals Court Overturned The Decision. According to the Federal News Network, “The U.S. Court of Appeals on Tuesday granted the Trump administration a win in its efforts to implement and enforce the president’s limits on collective bargaining and official time for federal employees. The appeals court overturned an August 2018 decision from a federal district court, which had invalidated nine key provisions of the president’s three executive orders. A group of federal employee unions had challenged the workforce executive orders last summer in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.” [Federal News Network, 7/16/19]
2020: Trump Signed An Executive Order Giving Agency Heads The Power To Undermine Career Civil Service Positions Within The Federal Government. According to the Federal News Network, “President Donald Trump signed a new executive order that will reclassify a portion of the career federal workforce, giving agency heads the ability to hire and fire them at will under a new class in the excepted service. The order, which the White House released Wednesday evening, creates a new schedule in the excepted service known as ‘Schedule F.’ It gives agency heads the authority to reclassify certain confidential, policy-making, determining or advocating positions from the career civil service to the excepted service under this new schedule.” [Federal News Network, 10/22/20]
AFGE: The Executive Order Was The “Most Profound Undermining Of The Civil Service In Our Lifetimes.” According to the Federal News Network, “The American Federation of Government Employees called the executive order the ‘most profound undermining of the civil service in our lifetimes,’ describing it as an effort by the president to ‘politicize and corrupt the professional service.’” [Federal News Network, 10/22/20]
Trump Pledged To Reintroduce His “Schedule F” Executive Order In A Second Term In Order To Give Himself More Power Over The Federal Workforce. According to Reuters, “Donald Trump's vow to give himself the power to gut the federal workforce if he is elected to the White House again has unions, Democrats and watchdog groups preparing for legal action and seeking to tighten protections to prevent the former president from bending the bureaucracy to his will. Trump, the clear frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, has pledged to reintroduce an executive order known as Schedule F if he wins a second term in November 2024. That would give him the power to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of government civil servants, potentially fire them and bring in loyalists willing to implement far-right policies and his self-described ‘retribution’ agenda against those he feels have wronged him.” [Reuters, 12/22/23]
Federal Mediators Advised The Department Of Education That It Violated Federal Law When It Imposed Rules On Workers That Curtained Their Protections And Access To Union Representation. According to the New York Times, “Federal labor mediators have advised the Education Department that it most likely imposed new work rules on its employees illegally, curtailing workers’ protections and access to union representation in violation of federal law. The American Federation of Government Employees said Tuesday that the Federal Labor Relations Authority advised the Education Department that it had engaged in ‘bad-faith bargaining’ when it implemented a contract this year that gutted compensation and benefits provisions for the department’s 3,900 employees, and limited employees’ ability to carry out union duties during the work day.” [New York Times, 7/24/18]
The Department Of Education’s Rules Mirrored Those Throughout The Trump Administration. According to the New York Times, “The decision could have broad implications because the Education Department’s actions mirror Trump administration efforts throughout the federal government. The Social Security Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs have begun implementing work rules similar to the ones at the Education Department, union officials said. And many of the anti-union elements reflect a series of executive orders on the federal work force that President Trump signed in May.” [New York Times, 7/24/18]
Between 2017 And 2019, There Was A 20% Increase In The Number Of Disability Discrimination Complaints Filed By Federal Employees. According to NBC News, “In October 2018, the Trump White House recognized National Disability Employment Awareness Month and renewed its commitment to ‘creating an environment of opportunity’ for people with disabilities. But there has also been a 20 percent increase since Jan. 1, 2017, in the number of disability discrimination complaints filed by federal employees of cabinet-level agencies, according to an NBC News analysis of data from the EEOC.” [NBC News, 8/8/19]
2017: The Federal Government Fired 24% More Full-Time Employees With Disabilities Than It Did In 2016. According to NBC News, “And while the Trump administration was adding disabled employees, it also stepped up the pace of firing them. In 2017, the government fired 2,626 full-time employees with disabilities, according to documents from the EEOC obtained by NBC News. That marks a 24 percent increase from 2016.” [NBC News, 8/8/19]
Federal Workers With Disabilities Were Fired At Almost Twice The Rate Of Employees Without Disabilities. According to NBC News, “The EEOC data indicates that workers with disabilities were fired at almost two times the rate of those without disabilities.” [NBC News, 8/8/19]
Trump Stripped Civil-Service Job Protections From Employees At The Department Of Veterans Affairs. According to Politico, “Last June, President Donald Trump fulfilled a campaign promise by signing a bipartisan bill to make it easier to fire employees of the Department of Veterans Affairs. The law, a rare rollback of the federal government’s strict civil-service job protections, was intended as a much-needed fix for an organization widely perceived as broken.” [Politico, 3/12/18]
Firings Rose 60% In The Six Months After The Law Was Passed. According to Politico, “The law’s effect was nearly instantaneous: Firings rose 60 percent during the second half of 2017, after the law took effect, compared to the first half of 2017. Since June, the VA has removed 1,704 of its 370,000 employees.” [Politico, 3/12/18]
The Trump Administration Increased Spending To Outsource Federal Jobs To Temp Agencies. According to the National Employment Law Project, “Since President Trump took office, the federal government has sharply increased spending to outsource work to temp agencies, more than doubling the amount spent on temporary help services in the past two years, according to a new analysis of government contracting data released today. Taxpayers are footing the bill for the costs associated with using temporary providers, even as the practice of outsourcing has been shown to degrade job quality and reduce accountability for the quality of services provided. The report, ‘Temping Out the Federal Government,’ finds that the federal government increased spending on temporary help service contracts fivefold over the last 10 years—from $323 million in 2008 to $1.7 billion in 2018. By far, the largest increase occurred in the past two years, when spending jumped from $812 million in 2016 to $1.7 billion in 2018.” [National Employment Law Project, 6/19/19]
AUDIO: Trump Called For Replacing The TSA With Private Contractors: “It Would Be, I Think, A Much More Efficient System.” According to the John Carlson Show via YouTube, “CARLSON: You owned an airline. Let’s promote you. You’re already president. You hear about these long lines. What does President Donald Trump do about them? Donald Trump: Well, first of all, I was just reading about it this morning. It’s terrible. I see it on television where people are waiting four or five hours. It’s never been worse. It has to do with two things. Number one, terrorism. You’ve got to knock the hell out of them. And number two – we have to be so much tougher on terrorism, otherwise it’s going to stymie the whole world. And number two – and I really view it in that order – number two, it’s running the way our country runs. It’s a mess. We have people that have no idea. We have people that shouldn’t even be TSA agents. They shouldn’t be TSA agents. They shouldn’t be, like, working at this stuff because, in many cases, they don’t have the capacity or the capability to do it. You know, you’re looking for a finite object in a suitcase some place. Now, I will say that with all of that, we have to get that geared up because, you know, you talk about Boeing, you’re not going to need airplanes if this continues because nobody is going to want to move. It’s going to ruin industry. Industries are going to be ruined. Carlson: The airlines are furious. Should, basically, TSA be fired? Should we allow private contractors to do what TSA apparently is not up to doing? Trump: In my opinion, you probably should because – and you have to be very strong with them though. You have to watch them very carefully, but you probably should because what I’m hearing is the level of security and the level of checking is not what it should be and despite that, you know, how does the government run something so big? You know, if you think about it, if you had an airline and they had three booths and they had people coming in, it would be, I think a much more efficient system. It should be a much better system, but you have to be careful is that they don’t cut back. You have a lot of – there’s no easy answer.” [John Carlson Show via YouTube, 5/18/16]