NTEU's Longtime President Will Retire in August

National Treasury Employees Union National President Tony Reardon announced Monday that he will retire after nearly a decade leading the labor organization.

Reardon has served at the helm of NTEU since 2015, and he has been an NTEU employee for 33 years. He will leave the union at the end of this term as national president in August.

“It is hard to leave the union that has been my professional home for more than 33 years,” Reardon said. “I have dedicated my career to representing NTEU’s members, and it has been the honor of my life to serve as NTEU national president.”

His tenure atop the nation’s second largest federal employee union was marked by a number of challenges, most stemming from the Trump administration’s desire to clamp down on labor organizations and make it easier to fire federal employees.

NTEU was a member of a coalition of federal employee unions that sued the Trump administration to try to block the implementation of a trio of executive orders aimed at making it easier to fire federal workers, reduce the scope of bargaining between agencies and their employees and severely curtail the use of official time. The union also challenged the president’s ability to appoint members of the Federal Service Impasses Panel without Senate confirmation, after Trump filled the body with appointees who were outwardly hostile to organized labor. NTEU ultimately lost both cases on jurisdictional grounds.

Reardon also oversaw the union during the 35-day partial government shutdown in early 2019, and helped pressure the Trump administration to take action to protect federal employees at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

NTEU saw a number of legislative victories during Reardon’s tenure. In 2019, Congress enacted a measure granting federal employees up to 12 weeks of paid parental leave each year, and lawmakers also passed legislation automatically providing federal workers with back pay after the end of any future lapse in appropriations and ensuring that they did not lose access to their health insurance coverage through the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program during an extended government shutdown.

“NTEU is strong and well-positioned to continue to fight for our members, to represent them in the workplace and on Capitol Hill,” Reardon said. “There is a long tradition of leadership across NTEU that will carry this union forward. The dedication to our mission of ensuring federal employees are treated with dignity and respect remains as strong today as it was when NTEU was founded 85 years ago.”

NTEU members will select their next national president and executive vice president at the union’s national convention in August.

Although many of the policies put forth by the Trump administration were undone by President Biden shortly after his inauguration in 2021, new challenges await NTEU and other federal employee unions. Republican lawmakers in recent months have assailed federal workers’ use of telework, and multiple confirmed and prospective presidential candidates have endorsed a controversial proposal to strip tens of thousands of federal workers of their civil service protections, commonly known as Schedule F.