The Deep State Next Door

For the past decade, conservative battle cries have circled ever-tighter around the urgency of taking down the “deep state” — the layers of federal bureaucracy that allegedly undermined the first Trump administration. Though originally used by progressive commentators during the Obama years to spotlight the entrenched power of national security and law enforcement agencies, the term “deep state” was appropriated by Donald Trump early in his first term. Since then, it has mutated into a catch-all for the entire machinery of government and its vast workforce.

Trump made “destroying” this shadow government a cornerstone of his 2024 campaign, while his rivals in the GOP primary fell over themselves attempting to prove their own commitment to rooting out “woke” and “rogue” government employees. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis infamously promised that, if he was elected president, he would start “slitting throats on Day One.” 

This crusade against the federal government — now being spearheaded by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency — has been framed as a populist push to devolve power from the “unaccountable” government lifers in Washington. The very term “deep state” conjures sinister images of hidden elites manipulating the levers of power. In truth, however, the vast majority of federal employees are located outside of Washington and engaged in the mundane tasks associated with providing critical services to communities across the country. The deep state includes the clerks at local Social Security field offices, nurses at Veterans Affairs hospitals and air traffic controllers at our nation’s airports. Their invisibility makes them tempting targets to scapegoat, but the overwhelming majority are ordinary Americans devoted to the everyday functioning of the country. 

Consider the roughly 47,000 security officers at the Transportation Security Administration , who last month were targeted by the administration when the secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, revoked their collective bargaining rights and unlawfully terminated an agreement that was set to last until 2031. That agreement was a first for TSA employees, who had long been excluded from Title 5 of the U.S. Code, which provides various protections and rights to federal workers (including the right to collective bargaining). For years, the TSA was one of the worst places to work in the federal government, with low pay, low job satisfaction and high turnover rates. But that began to change when President Joe Biden ordered the agency to comply with Title 5 workplace standards in 2021. After voting to ratify their first major collective bargaining agreement last year, workplace satisfaction improved and attrition rates declined sharply. 

Naturally, the Trump administration saw this trend as a dangerous encroachment on executive authority. In an email to staff announcing the decision to strip agents of their collective bargaining rights, TSA senior official Adam Stahl repeated boilerplate DOGE messaging. Removing the “constraints of collective bargaining,” he wrote, aligns with the administration’s “vision of maximizing government productivity and efficiency.” It also aligns with the vision of Project 2025, which called for the TSA workforce to be “deunionized immediately” — before privatizing the agency altogether. Unsurprisingly, morale has plummeted among TSA employees since the Trump administration’s announcement. 

This crackdown on collective bargaining rights at the TSA was just the beginning of a union-busting campaign that Trump has since extended across the federal government. In late March, the president signed a sweeping executive order that aims to rescind collective bargaining agreements across more than a dozen federal agencies under the pretense of “enhancing” national security. In reality, the executive order impacts wide segments of the federal workforce in agencies that have little to do with national security, from Veterans Affairs to the Environmental Protection Agency to Human and Health Services. While offering the pretext of national security, the administration hasn’t even bothered to conceal its real motivations. In a fact sheet posted by the White House, it states that certain federal unions have “declared war” on the president’s agenda by “widely filing grievances to block Trump policies.” Those “policies” are almost all part of the slash-and-burn assault on the federal workforce currently being carried out by Elon Musk and his DOGE, which poses a far greater threat to national security than unions ever could. 

If upheld in the courts and fully implemented, around 1 million federal employees — nearly half of the entire federal workforce — would no longer be eligible for union representation. Already, the administration has stopped withholding dues from paychecks at the agencies targeted by the order in an effort to cut off funds to the unions. Randy Erwin, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, summed it up as the “biggest attack on collective bargaining rights that we have ever seen in this country by a wide margin.” 

There appear to be two main goals behind the Trump administration’s attack on federal unions. First, the president hopes to eliminate any remaining pockets of independence inside the federal bureaucracy and to transform each agency into an extension of his personal will. “By selectively revoking the collective bargaining rights of workers represented by unions that are challenging the Trump administration’s attacks on federal workers,” says Margaret Poydock, senior policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, “this executive order is also a direct assault on the principles of democracy and the rule of law.​” To the president, unions represent a threat — not just to his policies, but to his broader goal of using state power for political payback.

The second aim is more ideological. It is about fulfilling the conservative movement’s longtime goal of crushing organized labor. As Erwin put it shortly after Trump’s executive order, these attacks on federal unions are “part of a ploy to eliminate unions throughout this country, not just in the federal government, but unions in this country altogether.” 

Trump’s order is arguably the most audacious presidential attack on federal unions since President Ronald Reagan crushed the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization in 1981. The consequences of that action are well known. Though PATCO was a public union, its demise ultimately had much more devastating consequences for labor unions in the private sector. Reagan’s decision to quash the air traffic controllers strike was widely (and correctly) interpreted by corporate America as a green light for them to go to battle with organized labor. Over the next decade, union-busting tactics such as illegally firing organizers and bringing on permanent replacements for striking workers became commonplace. This had an immediate chilling effect on strike activity, with the number of major work stoppages plummeting in the years that followed, along with a steep decline in overall unionization rates. When Reagan started his presidency, the private sector had a unionization rate slightly less than 20%. By the end of the decade it had fallen to almost 10%, and today it stands at 5.9% — lower than it was during the Coolidge administration. 

Like PATCO, Trump’s crackdown on public sector unions will embolden management to go after employees organizing their workplaces. And after four years of relatively pro-labor policies under President Joe Biden, Trump has signaled that they will find his administration more sympathetic to management going forward. This has been most evident at the National Labor Relations Board, which Trump has aggressively pushed in a pro-management direction following his removal of general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo in January. Last month, he nominated attorney Crystal Carey as Abruzzo’s replacement. While Abruzzo has represented labor unions throughout her career, Carey is a partner at one of the country’s top law firms for management. That firm, Morgan Lewis, represents clients like Amazon and SpaceX and even led negotiations for the Reagan administration in its dispute with PATCO.

The president has also attempted to remove board member Gwynne A. Wilcox, whose five-year term was set to last until August 2028. This action has been moving through the courts, and last week a federal appeals court reinstated Wilcox only to have Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily stay the ruling as the Supreme Court considers an appeal. Wilcox’s removal has left the board without a quorum, temporarily disrupting its work in issuing decisions. More concerning, however, is what her removal, if upheld, will do to the independence of the New Deal era agency that was created to help workers unionize. “By firing board member Gwynne Wilcox for ‘unduly disfavoring employers,’ Trump has made it clear that he expects the NLRB to rule on the side of employers,” Poydock told me. 

Trump’s return to power was fueled by a great many delusions, but none greater than the fantasy that he was somehow “pro-worker.” During his first term, Trump filled his administration with billionaires who actively sought to undermine the labor movement while delivering massive tax cuts to the rich. Despite this clear track record, many voters and even some union leaders bought into the illusion that he would stand with working people in a second term. That illusion was shattered the moment he enlisted the world’s richest man — and one of the country’s most notorious union busters — to lead a crusade against the federal workforce. 

The Trump administration has all but declared war on the more than 2 million federal workers, and is determined not only to break them but “put them in trauma,” as the new director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russ Vought, put it last October. The vindictive quality of this threat will feel all too familiar to anyone who has ever faced hostile management. It was familiar to steel workers in the 1890s, auto workers in the 1930s and air traffic controllers in the 1980s — and it is certainly familiar to workers at companies like Amazon and Tesla today. Ultimately, Trump’s war on the “deep state” is part of the larger attack on the labor movement. If the executive order stands, observed labor historian Joseph McCartin, “its destructive force promises to be many orders of magnitude larger than the PATCO affair.” That is not just bad news for federal employees, but for every worker in the country.