Trump administration ends union dues collection for most feds without notice

The Trump administration has apparently ceased collecting federal workers’ union dues via voluntary payroll deduction at agencies targeted by a recent executive order seeking to strip employees of their collective bargaining rights without notice, leaving labor groups in financial upheaval.

Last month, President Trump signed an executive order citing a rarely used provision of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act to exempt agencies from federal labor law under the guise of “national security.” The edict, which also carves out non-national security agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and Federal Communications Commission, collectively strips two-thirds of the federal workforce of their right to join and be represented by a union.

The administration has filed multiple lawsuits in federal courts staffed with only Republican-appointed judges seeking the legal go-ahead to terminate union contracts at agencies targeted by the order. Despite those suits’ suggestion that the administration would wait for such a decision before repudiating CBAs, unions said that this week, the government’s three main payroll processors have all surreptitiously ceased collecting union dues directly from employees’ paychecks.

Matt Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, said that the news trickled out this week as employees began receiving their paychecks—and union locals stopped receiving payments. The Defense Finance and Accounting Service; which provides payroll services to the Defense, Health and Human Services and Veterans Affairs departments; also canceled deductions for a union-supplied supplementary vision and dental insurance plan. Approximately one-third of IFPTE’s membership is federal workers, mostly within the Defense Department.

“DFAS apparently just cut off the union dues and did not notify—none of the unions got notice among our locals, at least,” he said. “And from my understanding, even the agencies themselves within DOD didn’t get notice that they were cutting them off. It happened unilaterally, without notice, and it happened quickly.”

An official at another federal employee union familiar with the matter told Government Executive that local unions at agencies serviced by the Interior Department’s Interior Business Center and the Agriculture Department’s National Finance Center, both of which provide payroll services to large swathes of the federal government, took similar action this week, all without notifying the unions or customer agencies.

And, in at least one case, the National Finance Center deducted union dues from employees’ paychecks and then failed to pass that money along to the union, requiring them to then refund those dues back to the employees.

None of the three payroll providers responded immediately to a request for comment Wednesday. The cancellation comes amid news, first reported in The New York Times, that operatives from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Governmental Efficiency had gained access to the Interior Department’s Federal Personnel and Payroll System, which underpins the IBC’s work.

As of Wednesday afternoon, the breadth of the administration’s cessation of union dues collection is unclear, particularly as it pertains to offices of the chief information officer, which were exempted from collective bargaining across government as part of the edict. It also is not clear whether or how the payroll processors are handling portions of impacted agency workforces that were exempted from the order, such as law enforcement and firefighting personnel.

The American Federation of Government Employees, the nation’s largest federal worker union, is the only major labor group to have implemented an alternative system to collect union dues outside of federal payroll systems. That initiative was undertaken after the Education Department and Environmental Protection Agency sought to cease collecting dues on behalf of workers during Trump’s first term.

Biggs said IFPTE is in the process of developing a so-called eDues system, but it will take at least another three weeks before the union can deploy it. And in the National Treasury Employees Union’s lawsuit seeking to block the order’s implementation, officials said the end of automatic dues collection would slash the union’s revenue by more than half.