Hegseth orders termination of union contracts

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week instructed leaders to terminate most of the department’s collective bargaining agreements, more than a year after President Trump signed an executive order banning federal employee unions from many agencies on national security grounds.

In an April 9 memo obtained by Government Executive, Hegseth gave his deputies 24 hours to take action to cancel their union contracts, with some exceptions. In April 2025, Hegseth exempted bargaining units made up of Federal Wage System workers at four installations—the Letterkenny Munition Center in Pennsylvania, the Air Force Test Center in California, the Air Force Sustainment Center in Oklahoma, and the Fleet Readiness Center Southeast in Florida.

“I hereby direct the termination of all collective bargaining agreements  to which the department is a party, not subject to a court order enjoining implementation to which the department is a party, not subject to a court order enjoining implementation of Executive Order 14251, ‘Exclusions from Federal Labor-Management Relations Programs,’ within 24 hours of the date of this memorandum, except as applied to the population covered by the [April 2025] secretary of defense certification . . . and the local employing offices of any agency police officers, security guards or firefighters, pursuant to EO 14251,” Hegseth wrote. “This action is required to align agency operations with national security requirements as outlined in EO 14251.”

Spared from this memo are unions like the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers and the Federal Education Association, who both secured preliminary injunctions blocking implementation of the executive order, which cites a seldom-used provision of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act to strip two-thirds of the federal workforce of their collective bargaining rights on national security grounds, last fall.

Not so for the nation’s largest federal employee union. In a statement Wednesday, American Federation of Government Employees National President Everett Kelley decried Hegseth’s decision as “cowardly.”

“For 50 years, these employees have exercised their union rights; under several administrations, during a global pandemic and throughout peacetime and wartime, including our most recent conflict with Iran,” he said. “To rip up the union contracts of civilian employees after touting a successful ceasefire in the Middle East is not only a slap in the face to the employees who supported those efforts, but again proves that this action has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with silencing workers’ voices.”