As President Donald Trump’s actions targeting federal government unions and employees make their way through the courts, new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests the president’s show of force against American public servants may have backfired.
Since last March, Trump has moved to abruptly end union protections for hundreds of thousands of government workers. At the same time, largely through the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, the administration in 2025 fired tens of thousands of federal workers while tens of thousands more retired, quit, or accepted the DOGE “fork in the road buy out.” Data from the BLS January jobs report shows the federal government shed 324,000 jobs between January 2025 and January 2026.
Despite this, the number of federal employees who are union members increased by 6.4% between 2024 and 2025, according to the annual BLS Union Members Summary published Wednesday. The number of federal workers who are represented by unions, which means that a worker might be covered by a union contract but not a member, increased by 3.2%.
The increase in union membership and representation likely stems completely from a galvanized federal workforce whose members sought workers rights protections amid attacks from the Trump White House, Celine McNicholas, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, told TPM.
“It’s folks actively choosing to join their union, and it does make a little bit of intuitive sense if you think about it, while all of these attacks have been going on,” McNicholas said. “Those lawsuits trying to defend folks’ right to their jobs or their rights to collective bargaining are being led by the unions themselves.”
Trump’s March executive order applied a national security provision in the U.S. Code to a wide swath of previously excluded departments and agencies to invalidate collective bargaining for more than 300,000 employees. Departments included in that order ranged from the Department of Veterans Affairs, to the Food and Drug Administration, from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service to the Federal Communications Commission. Departmental response was swift. Last summer, the VA, the Environmental Protection Agency and FEMA, among others, announced an end to their collective bargaining agreements. But just as promptly came the legal reactions from federal unions. Six unions, including the American Federation of Government Employees, sued the administration and a U.S. District judge issued an injunction halting the order. By August, though, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals lifted the injunction, granting the Trump administration license to continue bulldozing federal workers’ rights while the case played out in court.
A diverse array of unions have filed at least 16 lawsuits fighting Trump’s attacks on federal collective bargaining, according to a litigation tracker by Just Security, a law and policy journal based out of the New York University School of Law. Beyond defending their right to unionize, unions are behind at least 30 total lawsuits challenging the Trump administration.
Access to the union law firm is one reason Peter Cantwell, president of the National Association of Independent Labor (NAIL), believes his union membership has increased “manyfold” since January 2025. Cantwell also attributed the membership boost to the work of his staff and local presidents. NAIL represents thousands of federal employees across 20 locals working at the EPA, the Department of Defense, the Department of Transportation, and the Department of Commerce.
Cantwell said his membership increased 50% beginning in early 2025, driven, to his surprise, by early and mid-career employees.
“Employees know and understand we provide persistent and quality assistance when unfortunate challenges arise in employment,” Cantwell told TPM via email. “While times are challenging in [f]ederal [e]mployment, employees still want to do the nation’s business with all the legal protections Congress has provided and SCOTUS has affirmed.”
While the Department of Homeland Security has made much ado about its massive federal law enforcement hiring spree, McNicholas said the hiring of a few thousand extra immigration and customs agents is not responsible for the bump in federal union members. This is for a few reasons, McNicholas said. First, Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced the hiring of 12,000 new officers in 2025, a “historic 120% manpower increase,” ICE said in a press release, but a paltry figure in light of the millions of federal workers employed nationwide. Their hiring and union representation wouldn’t make a dent in the BLS figures, McNicholas suggested. Next, the funding for increased ICE and Customs and Border Protection officer hiring came more than halfway through the year with Trump’s tax cuts and defense spending bill, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. As the BLS report is annual, McNicholas wouldn’t expect a late-in-the-year hiring spree to impact its data. And finally, the federal government moves slowly. McNicholas said she’d seen reports of newly hired federal law enforcement who still hadn’t received benefits.
Meanwhile, federal unions have scored some legal wins against the Trump administration over the last year. In November, Judge Paul Friedman of the U.S. District Court for D.C. temporarily paused the Trump administration’s attempt to cancel collective bargaining rights for workers at the United States Agency for Global Media, home to Voice of America. In December, Judge Susan Illston of the U.S. District Court for Northern California ruled that Trump’s firing of federal workers during the historically long government shutdown violated a continuing resolution passed by Congress, ordered the administration to reinstate workers and paused further cuts.
In response to the BLS union report, which showed overall union membership in 2025 up slightly year over year, Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, said union-busting bosses are failing.
“These numbers confirm what we’ve seen in the labor movement: Workers have felt President Trump’s billionaire-first agenda in action and are hungry to take back their power,” Shuler said in a release.
McNicholas said taxpayer dollars are funding the president’s legal defense against the tens of suits brought by unions, as well as the hundreds of suits filed to challenge Trump’s myriad executive orders.
“I’ve heard many a union organizers say nothing motivates workers to speak up and demand representation like a terrible boss,” McNicholas said, “and I would argue Trump is the ultimate terrible boss.”
