WASHINGTON, D.C. (Federal News Network) — The House Armed Services Committee is pushing back against President Donald Trump’s executive order that removes collective bargaining rights for civilian workers at nearly three dozen federal agencies in an effort “to enhance the national security of the United States.”
During its annual marathon markup session last week, the committee adopted an amendment offered by Rep. Donald Norcross (D-N.J.) to ban the Defense Department’s use of fiscal 2027 funds to implement the president’s executive order.
While the Defense Department civilian employees became the latest to lose their protections provided under collective bargaining agreements, many agencies — including the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Federal Emergency Management Agency — have moved to terminate their collective bargaining agreements following Trump’s executive order.
“This is the largest rollback of federal labor rights in modern American history,” Norcross said.
The amendment passed 30-26 — Reps. Mike Turner of Ohio, Don Bacon of Nebraska and Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin joining Democrats in support of the measure.
Last year, Norcross introduced a similar provision that was ultimately stripped from the final version of the 2026 defense policy bill. At the time, Government Executive reported that despite more than a dozen House Republicans urging Senate lawmakers to support the measure, only Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) pushed for its inclusion.
The issue is once again expected to become a point of contention as House and Senate lawmakers negotiate a final version of the fiscal 2027 National Defense Authorization Act.
“I think this is one of the most consequential amendments we’re going to see today. President Trump’s executive order last year eliminated the collective bargaining rights for over 1.5 million federal employees, including a large swath of DoD civilian employees. It was single-handedly the hottest and most aggressive anti-union action taken by a president in U.S. history,” Rep. Sarah Elfreth (D-Md.) said.
The executive order is currently the subject of multiple lawsuits in federal court — but the HASC amendment would block its enforcement across the Defense Department.
Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), the committee’s chairman, opposed the amendment, arguing that it “unnecessarily restricts” the president’s authority to manage the workforce of national security agencies.
“The President is well within his authority granted by the Civil Service Reform Act to limit collective bargaining with federal unions that have a national security mission. In fact, he is not the first president to do so. Previous presidents have used the national security exemption to prohibit collective bargaining with the CIA and other national security agencies,” Rogers said.
While presidents have long had the authority to exclude federal agencies and subdivisions from collective bargaining due to national security priorities, Ira Rushing, an associate at the Tully Rinckey law firm, said the scope of Trump’s order is what sets it apart from previous administrations.
“The union’s main argument is this statute is a narrow carve out. It’s not a blank check. Congress wrote it for agencies with intelligence and national security work as their primary function, and so bringing in all of these other agencies and subdivisions whose primary functions are like regulatory or scientific such as the EPA or the FDA or the CDC. That stretches the statute past its breaking point,” Rushing told Federal News Network.
“The unions are saying, ‘The president can’t use this narrow exception to swallow the whole rule that Congress established for the rest of the federal workforce. There has to be a limit,” he added.
When lawmakers asked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in April about his decision to terminate virtually all collective bargaining agreements across the department, Hegseth said he “fundamentally believes the Department of War should not be subject to collective bargaining. Full stop.”
“I think our department does a great job providing pay and benefits for folks across the spectrum,” Hegseth told the House Armed Services Committee on April 29.
