EPA workers 'muzzled' by CBA cancellations, speech restrictions

Firing provisional employees, offering deferred resignation agreements, introducing speech restrictions, cancelling collective bargaining agreements covering hundreds of thousands of workers, mandating in-person work, eliminating healthcare protections.

The Trump administration is making so many changes to federal employees' working conditions and busting their unions so rapidly that workers and their unions can't react quick enough.

This month, leadership at five agencies, among them the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Environmental Protection Agency, cancelled collective bargaining agreements. More than 400,000 workers — most of them at the VA — have been affected by these cancellations. Altogether, the scrapped CBA’s add up affecting more than 2.5 percent of all unionized workers in the country.

The American Federation of Government Employees is suing to block President Donald Trump’s March 27 executive order ending federal agencies’ CBAs, which he claimed could undermine “national security.” Agencies started moving forward with cancellations in early August after a federal appellate court panel overturned a U.S District court judge's preliminary injunction.

Workers at the EPA — already squeezed by resignation offers and return to office mandates — are losing out on rights guaranteed to them in their union contract and being prevented from undertaking union activity, even while off the clock.

“We got notice yesterday that we can't even do union business on our personal time without prior approval from our ethics office,” one EPA worker in New York said in an interview on Thursday. “It’s a violation of our first amendment rights.”

Workers at the agency are also no longer being given leave to engage in union business and the agency is trying to take away the union’s office space, said the worker, who requested anonymity because of the EPA’s crackdown. And agency management is no longer hearing official worker grievances. “The EPA is very punitive right now and looking to go after workers for anything,” he said.

Another EPA worker said they’re exploring ways to fight back against the new directive that prevents union activity which the worker said is “certainly” unconstitutional and is “designed to stifle speech.”

In July, 139 EPA workers were placed on administrative leave and investigated after they wrote a letter asking EPA administrator Lee Zeldin to end deregulation policies.

A spokesperson for the EPA said the agency "is working to diligently implement President Trump’s Executive Orders with respect to AFGE, including ‘Exclusions from Federal Labor-Management Relations Programs’, in compliance with the law."

'Serious attacks'

Ben Mabie, a staffer in Local 98 of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, which represents workers at the Army Corps of Engineers, said that EPA workers “have been muzzled.” As a program director at the Federal Unionist Network, Mabie has been trying to organize across the federal workforce and support civil servants in the face of Trump’s cuts.

He said that newly instituted policies at the EPA, VA and other agencies are part of the Trump administration’s intent to turn the government into a “blunt instrument for pursuing narrow ideological interests and for padding the pockets of the billionaires who are calling the shots." Mabie cited speeches made by Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget in 2023 and 2024, in which he said that if he ever took the reins of the federal government his goal would be for “bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.”

"We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so,” Vought said in a speech first cited by ProPublica. “We want to put them in trauma.”

That plan, Mabie said, is now coming to fruition.

“Across the board we’re seeing serious deleterious attacks on people's working conditions,” he argued. “Even [in the Army Corps of Engineers] we're seeing examples of union busting activity which is taking place in ways big and small across the federal government.”

Gender affirming care cut

This week, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management issued a memo announcing that, starting next year, all federal employee health plans will be barred from covering hormone therapy or surgical procedures classified as gender affirming care. The change covers the health plans of over 10 million federal employees, though it will only likely affect a small fraction of workers who are transgender and will seek care in the future, as it doesn’t affect those currently in treatment.

The National Nurses union — which represents 225,000 nurses across the U.S. — condemned the change in a statement, calling the restriction one of a litany of “political attacks on vulnerable minorities” from the Trump administration. “They simply want to prevent more people from accessing this kind of care, part of a broader agenda to close off every possible avenue for transgender people to seek care and even participate in civic life,” reads the NNU’s statement.

An EPA worker called the restrictions on gender affirming care “absolutely disgusting.”

He joined several of his EPA colleagues as well as federal workers from the Internal Revenue Service, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other agencies on Thursday morning for a rally in lower Manhattan protesting the CBA eliminations. But EPA workers, wary of the new restrictions on union activity, had colleagues from another agency read out a prepared statement instead of speaking themselves.

But the worker pledged to keep fighting and organizing, regardless of the restrictions.

“We're staying active in the fight. We have to keep going and that's why we wanted to bring together federal unions," the worker said. "The work we do isn't just about us but it's about serving the American public.”

hfreeman@thechiefleader.com