Federal employees union grows to record size amid DOGE attacks

Federal workers say there’s never been a more confusing — and upsetting — time to work for the government, as they’re inundated with orders and memos at all hours of the day and night.

“We feel very degraded and insulted. … We feel terrorized,” said Regina Marsh, a Minnesota-based claim specialist for Social Security.

Marsh has worked at the federal government for her entire career — 37 years — starting right out of high school. She says it’s been a stable job and rewarding to help administer benefits to Americans who’ve recently become disabled or diagnosed with a terminal illness; people who have lost a spouse, and children who have lost a parent.

“We deal with people at the worst times of their lives,” Marsh said. “I feel like we’re compassionate and kind to the people that we serve, and we take pride in that.”

Scholten introduces bill to open Musk and DOGE to FOIA provisions

Marsh voted for President Trump in 2016 and 2020 because of her Catholic convictions on abortion, but lost faith in him after the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

“In all my years, we’ve been in and out of administrations on both sides of the aisle, and it’s never really changed our lives that drastically,” said Marsh, who is also executive vice president for AFGE Local 3129. “I feel like our government is being taken over and nobody is doing anything about it.”

The ranks of federal employee unions are swelling as they attempt to shield their members from a barrage of executive orders from President Trump, who with billionaire advisor Elon Musk, has launched an unprecedented assault on the federal workforce aimed at reducing its size and weeding out “disloyal” civil servants.

The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union, grew to a record size of 319,233 active members after adding more than 14,000 in the past five weeks. That’s nearly as many as the union added in the previous 12 months, according to union spokesman Tim Kauffman.

The growth is significant because public employees haven’t had to pay membership dues to the unions that bargain contracts on their behalf since the 2018 Supreme Court ruling in Janus vs. AFSCME. The added revenue will help the union’s many legal battles against the Trump administration on behalf of federal employees.

Jacob Romans, a registered nurse at the Minneapolis VA and president of AFGE Local 3669, says his local of about 2,000 nurses, physicians and other VA workers has added 100 members in the last two weeks alone.

“They’re looking for protections, and they don’t know what’s going to happen,” Romans said. “There’s a lot of uncertainty, a lot of anger.”

The unions — including the American Federation of Government Employees and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — have filed lawsuits challenging orders making career civil servants easier to fire; offering workers potentially illegal and unfunded buy-outs; and sharing confidential data with Musk’s initiative called the Department of Government Efficiency, which is not an official government agency.

Unions have also sued to block the gutting of USAID and stop DOGE from accessing Department of Labor data, which could give Musk access to non-public information about OSHA probes into his companies SpaceX and Tesla.

A federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s “Fork in the Road” buy-out offer until at least Monday. Union leaders and Democrats warned federal workers not to be cheated by the offer to resign and be paid through September because it is likely illegal and not funded. About 60,000 employees took the offer, according to Reuters, though it’s unclear how many were planning to leave anyways. The 60,000 workers represent about 2.5% of the total federal workforce, which typically sees 6% of workers resign or retire in a typical year.

Romans said he’s worried Trump’s executive orders offering buy-outs and ending remote work will only exacerbate the chronic short-staffing at the VA and lead to greater privatization, sending more federal funds to private hospitals.

It wouldn’t seem like Trump’s order ending remote work would affect jobs at the VA. But Romans said the Minneapolis VA employs doctors across the country — from Florida to Michigan — to provide virtual care to veterans.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen to them,” Romans said.

More than a fifth of the VA’s 479,000 employees have telework or remote work arrangements, but the agency hasn’t said what its policy will be regarding unionized employees.

Remote work is part of their union contract, but the Trump administration said it doesn’t believe it needs to honor those agreements, setting up another legal battle. A memo from the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human resources department, said determining telework is a “management right,” and “provisions of collective bargaining agreements that conflict with management rights are unlawful and cannot be enforced.”

“We’re going to disagree with that,” Romans said. “We bargained it, and they have to abide by that agreement.”

Minnesota Reformer is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: [email protected].