Labor

President Donald Trump said construction had already begun on a $15 billion steel plant in Iowa, which he called the largest in U.S. history; however, local records tell a different story.

On September 28, Trump announced the Mesabi Metallics project from the Oval Office together with officials from Iowa and company executives. The White House described it as "the largest steel plant ever built in the United States", and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told reporters that there was no doubt regarding the project.

“This deal is done,” Lutnick said. “They’ve already worked it out.”

Trump went further, adding that “They’ve already started building."

However, an investigation by Iowa television station KWQC found no major property acquisitions connected with the project in Lee County this year. The county authorities also stated that no permits had been submitted to the supervisors and that they had not obtained detailed plans from the company.

The plant that has been proposed will create approximately 1,750 permanent jobs together with thousands of temporary construction jobs, Mesabi Metallics has stated, and production is expected to start in 2030. There are still a number of steps to go through before construction can start.

Only a few days after Trump made his announcement, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds summoned the lawmakers back for a special session with the aim of extending the tax incentives offered to Mesabi. The Legislature eventually passed legislation that provided more than $1.3 billion in public funds and tax savings over a ten-year period.

That made it difficult for Lutnick to stick to his belief that the deal was already completed.

Debi Durham, who is the director of the Iowa Economic Development Authority, said that the special session would not have been necessary if Mesabi had agreed to construct the plant under Iowa's present incentive scheme.

Some members of the Republican Party also objected to the price.

“Do I believe the Iowa taxpayer received the best deal in this proposition? Absolutely not,” Republican state Sen. Dan Dawson said.

The full application from Mesabi still has to be approved by the Iowa Economic Development Authority before the state enters into a contract, and the chairwoman of the Lee County Board of Supervisors also stated that the company had not yet committed to a project site.

Mesabi said it “looks forward to breaking ground in the near future.”

The company's history has introduced yet another complication. CBS News reported that both Mesabi and Essar have already failed to meet their deadlines and have not fulfilled the job plans they had announced. Although Essar announced in 2008 a $1.6 billion iron mine and steel mill in Minnesota, which was intended to produce more than 700 permanent jobs, the steel mill was never constructed.

As late as July, job advertisements for the Mesabi company listed the proposed steel plant in Kentucky.

At this time, even though Trump had stated that construction had already started, the project in Iowa still does not have a final site and must obtain further approvals from the state before building can begin.

An Ohio Republican and lawmaker is feeling the political heat as he is slammed by voters who supported President Donald Trump — and blame him for being a loyal Trump supporter.

"Some of the attacks against [Sen. Jon] Husted (R-OH) appear to be working," reported The New York Times' Emily Davies on Monday about the tight reelection campaign facing the Republican senator. "Ben Meddles, 55, a firefighter in central Ohio, said he regretted voting for Mr. Trump, and that in turn was affecting his choice for Senate."

Davies quoted Meddles as saying, “You go in to vote and you feel good. And then sometimes, six months to a year later, you’re sorry for the way you voted.”

Meddles is "frustrated with the president for starting a war with Iran, imposing tariffs on Canada and spending so much time trying to take control of Greenland, which Mr. Meddles dismissed as 'showboating,'" according to Davies. "It all felt like a distraction, he said, from the president’s failure to deliver his signature campaign promise: economic relief at home. That promise, Mr. Meddles said, was why he had cast three ballots for Mr. Trump over the last decade."

In addition to losing voters because of his support for the Iran war, Husted is controversial in Ohio because of his outspoken backing of data centers. As lieutenant governor, Husted worked hard to cultivate data center construction by supporting tax breaks for the facilities.

Even some voters who still like Trump are souring on Husted.

"At the fair, Ms. Grenko had spent nearly $7 per gallon on diesel to fill up the five trucks she needed to cart her ponies to the event," Davies wrote. "That cost had been so crippling, she said, that she swapped her favorite mac-and-cheese brand, Kraft, for the Great Value version sold at Walmart. She also started to buy off-brand coffee creamer and toilet paper, and to eat more rice each week to fill up."

Davies continued, "In some ways, Ms. Grenko embodied both the opportunities and the challenges facing Mr. Husted. A loyal Trump Republican who gets her news exclusively from Fox, Ms. Grenko said she didn’t mind making those sacrifices if Mr. Trump was doing what he thought was best for the country. But her willingness to give up comforts for Mr. Trump does not mean she will vote for Mr. Husted, given how little she knows about him."

“I want him to step out, step up and say, ‘OK, this is what I think,’” Grenko told Davies about Husted. "Like Trump. Trump’s not afraid to say what he stands for.”

Considering that Ohio voted for Trump on all three occasions he ran for president, analysts have characterized Husted's struggles as emblematic of the larger issues facing the Republican Party in the 2026 midterm elections.

"How badly are things going for Republicans in what, for more than a decade, has been the reliably red state of Ohio?" Bloomberg News opinion columnist Erika D. Smith wrote earlier in September. "Just ask Jon Husted. The party's nominee for the U.S. Senate spent part of last week at the 'Trump-a-palooza' convention in Dallas, desperately trying to cast President Donald Trump's tax cuts for the wealthy as a fix for the affordability crisis. Then, Husted spent the weekend distancing himself from his now-former political director after it was revealed that he had promoted both Nazi imagery and songs tied to White supremacy online."

President Donald Trump, despite promising to create manufacturing jobs, is presiding over an economy marked by weak job gains in manufacturing sectors and widespread layoffs. Now experts are writing Labor Day editorials to explain how ordinary Americans can strike back and reclaim economic agency — and do so by exploiting weaknesses in Trump's own approach.

"On Labor Day 2026, the outlook for workers can seem grim," wrote Terri Gerstein (the director of the NYU Wagner Labor Initiative at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service) and Gaby Goldstein (the founder and president of State Futures) in the New Republic on Monday. "The Trump administration is rolling back workplace protections, and corporations act as though they have a free pass to do whatever they want."

Yet despite these problems, Gerstein and Goldstein argued there is a reason for "optimism."

"The federal government isn’t the only game in town," The New Republic wrote. "Union approval sits near a half-century high—roughly seven in ten Americans—worker organizing is climbing, and state and local governments are moving on workers’ rights with real dynamism."

They pointed out that on the state level, labor organizers are effectively passing and implementing laws guaranteeing worker protection, good workplace conditions and criminal prosecution against wage theft. On some occasions they are even creating workplace rights bureaus. From there, they advocate for Americans across these states to work together.

"For all this motion, a new ingredient should also be stirred in: cross-state coordination," Gerstein and Goldstein said. "Conservatives have long understood that states acting together, through the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, and its allies, can move markets and set national agendas. Progressives should be just as ambitious: sharing rosters of labor violators so a scofflaw barred in one state can’t win contracts in the next, coordinating multi-state cases, and even synchronizing the “drop dates” on which state labor bills are introduced."

While blue states are more friendly to these initiatives than red states, even Trumpy and purple areas of America are seeing progress on workers' rights issues.

"State legislators have made some minor inroads even in more challenging terrain: Utah and New Hampshire both curbed non-competes for certain health care workers this year," Gerstein and Goldstein added. "And there are still more glimmers of hope: Many city and state leaders in worker-hostile states keep fighting mightily for working people. Consider recent action in deep-red Texas: Just last month, Houston’s mayor signed an executive order raising the minimum wage at the city’s airports to $20 per hour, from its prior rate of $15. And Harris County, Texas, where Houston is located, last year passed a worksite safety policy for its construction contractors, with inspections and real consequences for violations."

Writing for The Hill, Gerstein elaborated on how Trump's administration has created conditions that necessitate this increased union activism.

"Sadly, the Trump administration is taking a bat to workers’ rights, reducing wage theft enforcement, shrinking the Department of Labor and weakening the National Labor Relations Board, which enforces workers’ right to unionize," Gerstein wrote for The Hill. "With Washington hostile and the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority averse to working people, that leaves cities and states."

"Here’s a new one: a deceptively simple, under-the-radar idea that requires no legislation and costs almost nothing," Gerstein continued. "State and local governments can help people unionize by simply helping to organize workers. Specifically, they can host meetups between workers and local unions, and they can teach the public about unions."

Earlier on Monday, The Conversation also ran a piece elaborating on the "bleak" conditions facing American workers as Trump continues to gut labor protections.

"For America’s unionized workforce, the overall state of the economy is bleak," The Conversation wrote. "Threats from AI and robotics abound. Pledges by U.S. and international corporations to invest in new plants remain largely pledges. The roughly 400,000 federal job cuts during President Donald Trump’s second term have disrupted lives. Many of these jobs were previously represented by labor unions."

President Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Federal Reserve needs to turn around America’s economy — but his surprising problem is Trump himself.

“The high-wire act starts before Warsh even has the job,” wrote The Wall Street Journal’s Nick Timiraos on Monday about Kevin Warsh, who Trump has appointed to replace the incumbent Jerome Powell. “Warsh secured the nomination by convincing Trump he shares the president’s view that the Fed should be cutting rates. At his Senate confirmation hearing Tuesday, he can reaffirm that case—at a moment when the Iran war has turned economic conditions against it—or begin, carefully, to distance himself from it.”

He added, “Air cover from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who last week said he understood why the war had made the Fed hesitant to cut, might have helped Warsh. But Trump publicly overruled Bessent one day later, saying he didn’t agree.”

In the end, Timiraos does not dispute that Warsh has ambition and could in theory thread the needle between Trump’s rhetoric and financial conventional wisdom.

“He says the Fed talks too much about the near-term path of rates and leans too heavily on backward-looking data,” Timiraos wrote. “He also says it plays too large a role in overnight lending markets after expanding its footprint during the 2008-09 financial crisis. Whether this will matter to the White House if rates aren’t coming down is another matter.”

The New York Times has also expressed reservations about Warsh. While they wrote Warsh “looks great on paper” and has "many admirers both on Wall Street and in Washington," he has a “credibility problem” because of Trump’s demand that Warsh, unlike Powell, cut interest rates.

"Is Mr. Warsh committed to Fed independence and to fighting inflation?" the Times asked, also noting that Warsh warned against interest rate cuts during the greater economic crisis of 2008-2009. "But in recent years, Mr. Warsh has sounded less worried about inflation and more worried about pleasing Mr. Trump. In 2018, during Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Warsh went to bat for the president, arguing that the central bank should extend the stimulus campaign he had once opposed. Since Mr. Trump’s return to office last year, Mr. Warsh has resumed his advocacy for easy money."

Catherine Rampell, an economics journalist, told conservative website The Bulwark earlier this month that Warsh’s reputation as an “inflation hawk” may run aground of Trump’s personality.

“The person that Donald Trump wants to appoint to succeed Jerome Powell is this guy, Kevin Warsh, who his entire career was known as an inflation hawk, basically wanted tighter monetary policy,” Rampell told The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger on Wednesday. “But lo and behold, [he] has changed his tune just in time to accept this nomination. And now he wants looser monetary policy, i.e. the lower interest rates that Donald Trump just coincidentally also happens to want.”

President Donald Trump may act like he is answerable to no one, but an ex-Republican consultant warns that he and the rest of the “Epstein class” are nearing the end of their heyday.

“Everyone knows how much the Trump family cares about the little people,” wrote Steve Schmidt, who previously advised President George W. Bush, in a Substack post on Tuesday. He then showed a picture of First Lady Melania Trump going to an immigrant detention facility wearing a jacket saying, “I don’t really care. Do u?”

“She’s a beautiful soul," Schmidt wrote sarcastically, and then proceeded to tell the story of Amanda Ungaro, who was reportedly held in an ICE detention facility for more than three months by her ex-partner Paolo Zampolli after Trump intervened to help Zampolli in a custody dispute.

“Melania claims it was Zampolli who introduced her to her soulmate at the Kit Kat Klub in Manhattan in 1998,” Schmidt wrote. “That’s the story at least. Ungaro came to the United States via airplane at age 16 or 17 from Brazil. She arrived via private jet.”

Schmidt then quoted Ungaro declaring on social media about Melania Trump that “I will tear down your corrupt system, even if it's the last thing I do in my life. I will go all the way—l am not afraid.” She added, "Maybe you should be afraid of what I know... of who you are, and who your husband.”

Schmidt even connected Trump’s failure to distance himself and his wife from the convicted late child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein to his recent seemingly staged photo op with an elderly female DoorDash driver.

“Donald Trump’s out-of-touch stooges thought it was a good idea to cast a grandmother in the role of a happy serf kissing the feet of her Lord with gratitude for his dispensations of a half pence to the low and unseen,” Schmidt wrote. “What it showed was the corruption of our age and the rot of American life. It showed the chasm between the Epstein class and normal Americans.”

Schmidt went on describe Trump's Mar-a-lago home in Florida as a "place of corruption, decadence and depravity," and he noted the president's inability to climb out from beneath Epstein's shadow.

The First Lady, for example, has repeatedly denied the accusations about her and Epstein being linked, including in a surprise press conference last week. But critics say Trump has failed to bury the Epstein scandal, despite his repeated efforts to do so.

“The American people don’t need any help being suspicious about the government’s handling of Jeffrey Epstein,” reported CNN’s Aaron Blake in February. “But the Trump administration keeps giving them more reason to be anyway.”

Blake aid "the plausibility" of victim's claims "isn’t the main point; the point is that an increasingly politicized Justice Department — one where a massive banner of Trump was hung last week — did not release documents containing allegations about the president.”

He added, “In a vacuum, that would be problematic. But next to everything else, it’s really bad.” Three out of four Americans said Trump is “hiding information” about Epstein, according to a recent Reuters and Ipsos poll, while a recent CNN poll put the number at two out of three. Indeed, the Trump administration only released the Epstein files that were disclosed when forced to, and has subsequently “failed to redact lots of victim information while apparently redacting more than the law called for in other areas, including the names of potential and suspected Epstein co-conspirators. The administration claimed it didn’t ‘redact the names of any men,’ but it clearly did.”

Despite others facing legal consequences in nations like the United Kingdom, no one in the United States has yet faced judicial accountability for their involvement with Epstein. But Schmidt predicted big changes in 203 days.

"I will see multitudes in the streets joyously celebrating as the MAGA Congress is obliterated," Schmidt said. "I see Lindsey Graham defeated.I see the beginning of the reckoning at hand. The disgrace of this era is far from over and the worst lies ahead, but I can see something very clearly. The world does not exist like Donald Trump sees it. His fantasy is crumbling."

The U.K. has reportedly ceased a nearly century-long agreement to share intelligence with the U.S., according to inside sources who spoke with The i Paper, citing President Donald Trump's erratic and aggressive behavior, as well as his tendency towards "screwing over allies."

In a report published Wednesday, sources indicated to the outlet that the vital security relationship shared between the U.S. and the U.K. "has been plunged into uncertainty," in the wake of "Washington’s threats to Greenland, its ambition to interfere in European politics and public outrage over Britain’s refusal to join the US war with Iran." Trump's repeated insults towards Britain's past military engagements with the U.S. and "personal insults" towards Prime Minister Kier Starmer have also driven the decision.

The joint intelligence-sharing relationship between the U.S. and the U.K. dates back to 1941, with "the exchange of information on Japanese and German ciphers" prior to the former's official entry into World War II. Since then, the partnership, known as "Two Eyes," has evolved into "a cornerstone of the Western alliance, with intelligence and military officials working together to combat all manner of threats, from direct war to clandestine operations."

According to one source in the U.K. Foreign Office, Trump's desire for an "America First" agenda has turned into a habit of "screwing over allies," with no indication that he will change course anytime soon. In the face of this behavior, the source said that the U.K. "cannot trust" its longtime ally for the time being. The i Paper further cited another recent report from the Financial Times, which revealed that American officials are being asked to leave meetings within U.K. government departments whenever "sensitive information" is being discussed.

Another British intelligence official told The i Paper that the decision was "tit for tat," arguing that it only came in response to the "similar hostilities" perpetrated by the U.S. John Foreman, the former Defense Attaché for the U.K. to Russia, added that “trust once gone is hard to restore."

"If the U.S. aren’t willing to ensure that UK secrets remain classified, then restrictions will have to be put in place," Foreman said. "But [this is] hard when intelligence sharing is so deep and wide.”

A senior official with NATO also told the outlet that Trump's rhetoric earlier in the year about annexing Greenland was "creating tensions and distrust" between the U.S. and its longtime European allies, including the U.K.

“We used to get beers together, but now it’s really strange," the source said. "I have been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan side-by-side with Americans. This is very disruptive in a way that I have never thought of before because it is so unrealistic and surprising.”

Salon's Amanda Marcotte, in her analysis of the 2024 presidential election results, often draws a clear distinction between Donald Trump's hardcore MAGA base and "low-information" independents who expressed their frustration with the U.S. economy —especially inflation — by voting for Trump. The MAGA diehards are still passionate Trump supporters, whereas independents were willing to give Trump a chance but lack that unwavering devotion.

A year into Trump's second presidency, poll after poll finds him with low approval ratings on the economy — and that includes many independents who are still feeling frustrated.

In an article published on January 22, The Guardian's Eduardo Porter reports that Trump is making a variety of proposals in an effort to improve his poll numbers — and so far, is flailing badly.

"Facing negative poll numbers," Porter explains, "Trump is taking a tack that few Republicans have dared contemplate before: spewing out a rain of often incoherent proposals to signal he feels voters' pain, in order to recapture their affection. U.S. inflation held firm in December amid pressure on Trump over cost of living. History suggests it might work. Yet, a year's worth of policy pronouncements for the working class matched with policies to serve the rich may have exhausted voters' goodwill toward the Trump Administration."

The Guardian reporter continues, "Trump's promise to lower energy costs hasn't panned out. Household energy prices have risen 7.3 percent so far on his watch, more than twice as much as during (former U.S. President Joe) Biden's last year in office. His promise to revitalize the auto industry isn't performing as planned. And he hasn't gotten anywhere near 'cutting the cost of a new home in half.'"

Trump promised that his steep new tariffs would lead to a renaissance in manufacturing jobs, but according to Porter, those jobs aren't materializing.

"Indeed, as U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has noted, tariffs are getting in the way of curbing inflation," Porter notes. "This has become a problem for the president. Forty-nine per cent of Americans think the economy is worse than it was a year ago, according to a Wall Street Journal Poll this month, while 54 percent disapprove of how the president has steered the economy. A survey for CNN found that 61 percent disagreed with Trump's economic policies…. From the mass deportation of immigrant workers to the tariffs on imports from all over the world — from his price caps on drugs and the equity stakes he has demanded from private firms — Trump's proposals show little coherence."

Read Eduardo Porter's full article for The Guardian at this link.

On May 1, roughly 4000 employees of defense manufacturers — including Lockheed Martin — went on strike. And in another strike, around 3000 employees of Pratt & Whitney (which manufactures essential components of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jet) walked off the job in Hartford, Connecticut.

In an article published by Politico on October 27, reporter Christopher Leonard warns that dissatisfaction among employees of defense manufacturers is problematic for the United States from a national defense standpoint.

"Something is going wrong on the assembly lines of America's arsenal of democracy, and it's happening at a moment of crisis," Leonard explains. "The White House, Pentagon and America's overseas allies are all demanding that defense companies ramp up production to meet the needs of a dangerous geopolitical moment. America is running short of missiles, munitions and battleships. Allies are waiting years for deliveries. Even the Pentagon has to stand in line and wait for delayed shipments of major weapons, like Hellfire missiles, Javelin rocket launchers and sophisticated air defense interceptors."

Leonard continues, "America is trying to surge its military capacity to produce more munitions, missiles and ships, but to do so, it must rely almost entirely on a group of five Fortune 500 defense companies. And none of these companies seem to be on war footing."

According to Leonard, Lockheed Martin and others are paying too much attention to Wall Street and not enough attention to their employees.

"Instead of hiring more workers and paying workers more in an effort to retain them," Leonard reports, "these companies are far more focused on meeting the demands of Wall Street, trying to entice investors and boost their stock price by cutting costs, as well as using billions of dollars in revenue to pay handsome dividends and buy back shares of stock. Last year, for example, Lockheed Martin gave $6.8 billion in buybacks and dividends directly to its shareholders, which amounted to nearly 10 percent of the company's total revenue and was larger than the $5.3 billion it kept in profits."

Leonard adds, "The same year, RTX, formerly called Raytheon, paid $3.7 billion to shareholders, General Dynamics paid $3 billion and Northrop Grumman paid $3.7 billion. The billions of dollars they send back shareholders each year means that there is less money to go toward paying, hiring or retaining their employees. As a result, jobs in defense manufacturing are becoming less and less attractive at a time when they need to be getting far more attractive."

In 2022, Billy Masters, a missile machinist and former union president, warned, "We cannot keep people. They bring them in on the low end of the pay scale.… They want cheaper wages. They want to keep the wage down. We're up against profit over anything else."

Three years later, Randy Tejada — a U.S. Army veteran and one of the Lockheed Martin workers who went on strike — has a similar warning.

Tejada told Politico, "I’m definitely looking for other options, since I see this company doesn’t take people that serious."

Read Christopher Leonard's full article for Politico at this link.

President Donald Trump's mass deportations are drawing criticism not only from Democrats and immigrants' rights groups, but also, from some sectors of the business world — including agriculture and hospitality, both of which rely heavily on immigrant labor.

The complaints from businesses are getting Trump's attention, as many farmers voted for him in 2024 and large hotels have been a big part of his real estate empire over the years.

In late June, the Trump White House announced a "temporary pass" for migrants working in agriculture and hospitality. And Trump said, "I cherish our farmers. And when we go into a farm and we take away people that have been working there for 15 and 20 years, who were good, who possibly came in incorrectly. And what we're going to do is we're going to do something for farmers where we can let the farmer sort of be in charge. The farmer knows he's not going to hire a murderer."

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But the conservative National Review, in an editorial published on July 1, comments, "Funny, we don't remember when it was that the American people elected the farm and hotel lobbies to be in charge of immigration enforcement."

The United States, the Review argues, needs a "robust" system to help businesses make sure that people they hire are in the country legally.

"America is more than a day-laborer hiring platform," The National Review's editorial board argues. "The hospitality and agriculture industries should not get a pass. And they should adapt themselves to lawful hiring. There is already a generous visa system for such workers; it can always be simplified and made easier to use. Hiring within the law almost certainly will mean offering higher wages or better working conditions and exploring greater automation, expedients that other American industries take for granted."

The Review editors add, "The alternative is a status quo in which a slice of the economy is marked off as the preserve of illegal labor. This constitutes allowing employers to create a class of workers who don't have the full protection of the law. This goes against America's republican ideals and the Republican Party’s founding principle of free men and free labor competing under one set of laws for all."

READ MORE: 'Cult in a bottle': Hilarious mockery ensues as Trump launches new perfume line

Read The National Review's full editorial at this link.

President Donald Trump's latest attack on the working class was delivered in the form of an executive order late Thursday that seeks to strip the collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal government workers, a move that labor rights advocates said is not only unlawful but once again exposes Trump's deep antagonism toward working people and their families.

The executive order by Trump says its purpose is to "enhance the national security of the United States," but critics say it's clear the president is hiding behind such a claim as a way to justify a broadside against collective bargaining by the public workforce and to intimidate workers more broadly.

"President Trump's latest executive order is a disgraceful and retaliatory attack on the rights of hundreds of thousands of patriotic American civil servants—nearly one-third of whom are veterans—simply because they are members of a union that stands up to his harmful policies," said Everett Kelley, president of the 820,000-member American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the nation's largest union of federal workers.

"The labor movement is not about to let Trump and an un-elected billionaire destroy what we’ve fought for generations to build. We will fight this outrageous attack on our members with every fiber of our collective being." —Liz Shuler, AFL-CIO

The far-reaching order, which cites the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act as the source of his presidential authority, goes way beyond restricting collective bargaining and union representation at agencies with a national security mandate but instead tries to ensnare dozens of federal agencies and classifications of federal workers who work beyond that scope.

According to the Associated Press, the intent of the order "appears to touch most of the federal government."

AFL-CIO president, Liz Shuler, responded with disgust to the order, pointing out that the move comes directly out of the pre-election blueprint of the Heritage Foundation, which has been planning this kind of attack against the federal workforce and collective bargaining for years, if not decades.

"Straight out of Project 2025, this executive order is the very definition of union-busting," said Schuler in a Thursday night statement. "It strips the fundamental right to unionize and collectively bargain from workers across the federal government at more than 30 agencies. The workers who make sure our food is safe to eat, care for our veterans, protect us from public health emergencies and much more will no longer have a voice on the job or the ability to organize with their coworkers for better conditions at work so they can efficiently provide the services the public relies upon."

Shuler said the order is clearly designed as "punishment for unions who are leading the fight against the administration's illegal actions in court—and a blatant attempt to silence us."

The White House practically admitted as much, saying in a statement that "Trump supports constructive partnerships with unions who work with him; he will not tolerate mass obstruction that jeopardizes his ability to manage agencies with vital national security missions." In effect, especially with a definition of "national security" that encompasses a vast majority of all government functions and agencies, the president has told an estimated two-thirds of government workers they are no longer allowed to disagree with or obstruct his efforts as they organize to defend their jobs or advocate for better working conditions.

Describing the move as "bullying tactics" by Trump and his administration, Kelley said the order represents "a clear threat not just to federal employees and their unions, but to every American who values democracy and the freedoms of speech and association. Trump’s threat to unions and working people across America is clear: fall in line or else."

"These threats will not work. Americans will not be intimidated or silenced. AFGE isn't going anywhere. Our members have bravely served this nation, often putting themselves in harm’s way, and they deserve far better than this blatant attempt at political punishment," he added.

Both AFGE and the AFL-CIO said they would fight the order tooth and nail on behalf of federal workers—and all workers—who have a right to collective bargaining and not to be intimidated for organizing their workplaces, whether in the public or private sector.

"To every single American who cares about the fundamental freedom of all workers, now is the time to be even louder," said Shuler. "The labor movement is not about to let Trump and an un-elected billionaire destroy what we've fought for generations to build. We will fight this outrageous attack on our members with every fiber of our collective being."

Kelley said AFGE was "preparing immediate legal action" in response to Trump's order and vowed to "fight relentlessly to protect our rights, our members, and all working Americans from these unprecedented attacks."