Labor unions are among Kamala Harris’ most fervent backers in her run for president, and federal employee unions especially so.
Not only do they love her unabashed support for labor, they also fear what her opponent Donald Trump might do if he’s elected president again.
It’s not hyperbole to say that since becoming vice president, Harris has played a key role in bringing federal employee unions back from the brink.
"Things have been kind of night and day different under this administration versus the previous administration," says Britta Copt, a 26-year veteran of the Environmental Protection Agency.
With the sweep of his pen, Trump disempowered federal employee unions
Labor unions represent roughly half the federal government's civilian workforce of 2.1 million people, according to government statistics.
Through a series of executive orders signed in 2018, Trump decimated the power of those unions, weakening their ability to bargain contracts and curtailing the amount of time union representatives can spend helping members with their complaints.
"We lost our ability to file grievances over most everything," says Copt, who's also president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3607, representing EPA workers in Colorado and Montana.
A plan to dismantle "the Deep State"
Late in his presidency, Trump came up with something even bolder, creating a new category of political appointees called Schedule F.
He did this via another executive order, saying it was part of his plan to rid the government of "rogue bureaucrats" and dismantle what he calls “the Deep State."
An unknown number of career civil servants were to be reclassified as political appointees, meaning they could be fired at will and replaced. There was talk of converting some 50,000 positions.
"The concern was a lot of our employees might be on the Schedule F list," Copt says.
The executive order targeted civil servants in policy-related roles, but Copt says no one really knew what that meant. She worried that she herself might make the list.
She never found out, because Joe Biden was elected president, and one of his first moves was to rescind the Schedule F executive order, along with others that Trump had signed targeting federal employee unions.
A Harris-led task force revitalizes the unions
Biden put Vice President Harris in charge of the new White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment, whose goal was to strengthen unions across the country.
The task force ordered federal agencies to give their unions a bigger seat at the table and to ensure that new and existing employees were aware of their right to join a union.
"This will be a model of what all industries have the capacity and the ability, if not the imperative, to do," Harris said at a meeting of the task force in October 2021.
By 2023, federal employee unions had added some 80,000 new members.
Copt says these changes also paved the way for a strong new labor contract at the EPA. It included, among other things, a scientific integrity article that ensured that employees feel safe raising concerns when science isn't being considered at all or appropriately, something they experienced in the Trump years.
Still, Copt knows all of this could go away in a second Trump term.
Federal employees "should be nervous"
Georgetown political scientist Donald Moynihan says there’s no doubt that if Trump wins in November, his old policies, including Schedule F, will be back.
"If you are a federal career employee, you should be nervous right now," he says.
Currently, the federal government has about 4,000 political appointees, up from 3,000 three decades ago.
Moynihan warns that if tens of thousands of deeply knowledgeable civil servants are replaced with partisan loyalists, the American public will suffer.
"It will slowly corrode the quality of government," he says.
"We don't want to be replaced"
That scenario is profoundly troubling to Tryshanda Moton, a senior aerospace engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
"I think that’s the fear because, you know, we see what Project 2025 says," says Moton.
Project 2025, the 900-page plan pulled together by the conservative Heritage Foundation, details how a Republican administration would expand the power of the president and gut the federal workforce.
Moton, who also holds a union leadership role with the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, recently joined a "Labor for Harris" Zoom call, pledging to do everything in her personal capacity to get Harris elected.
"We’ve sworn an oath to the Constitution to be representative constituents for the American public, and we don’t want to be replaced."
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