On a warm, still evening this month, Corey Trammel, a counselor at the Oakdale Federal Correctional Institution in central Louisiana, was at his 11-year-old son’s baseball game when the calls and emails started pouring in from dozens of his colleagues, worried about the latest threat to their union.
Mr. Trammel is the president of Local 3957 of the American Federation of Government Employees, the country’s largest union of federal workers. Until recently, Local 3957 had nearly 200 dues-paying members, all at Oakdale, including officers, teachers, case managers and food service workers.
Many, if not most, supported President Trump in the 2024 election, said Mr. Trammel, a registered Republican. And many were “in denial,” he said, as the new administration, with tacit support from a Republican Congress, moved quickly to slash and reshape the federal government.
The union, which represents some 800,000 workers across more than a dozen federal agencies, has been at the forefront of resistance to that effort. At a moment of peril for the civil service, the union has tried to assert itself as a countervailing force. In doing so, it has also become a target.
With his son on the pitcher’s mound, Mr. Trammel was figuring out how to deal with the Trump administration’s latest challenge: The Bureau of Prisons would no longer allow union dues to be deducted from paychecks. Within days, Local 3957 shrank to fewer than 50 paying members, who had signed up to use an online portal to pay their dues — $19.40 every two weeks.
“They keep kicking us when we are down,” Mr. Trammel said.
In interviews, more than a dozen union leaders and lawyers across the country described their current work as galvanizing, but also alarming and relentless. Some said the crisis had laid bare the challenges of a union that is, by its nature, decentralized and diverse. It is really a federation of many unions, including Border Patrol agents in heavily Republican states, environmental researchers in liberal ones and an array of political inclinations in between.
Some described tensions within the union — in particular, disagreements with how the national leadership has played its hand. Some want a more rousing call to arms, reflecting the appetite for confrontation among local members, while others say the union should stake out a moderate ground to appeal to a broader base of workers.
Backed by a slew of fellow unions and sympathetic nonprofits, the American Federation of Government Employees has filed a series of federal lawsuits against the Trump administration, some successful in at least staying the damage.
Every Monday, the union’s national leadership has a strategy call to discuss the latest measures from the Trump administration aimed at federal workers — from the “What did you do last week?” emails to the “fork in the road” enticements to resign to the abrupt move to end collective bargaining agreements. (In March, the White House said the agreements enabled “hostile federal unions to obstruct agency management.”)
“I can’t compare this to any other time in my career,” the union’s national president, Everett Kelley, said in an interview. “We’ve seen some tough fights, but never have we seen any president” try to “put the federal government into mission failure.”
Mr. Kelley said he saw the administration’s effort as a prelude to privatizing vast swaths of the federal work force.
“At the same time, I think not only are federal workers realizing the urgency of our mission, I think the American people are realizing it,” he said.
The battle is perhaps most acute on the local level, where union leaders like Mr. Trammel — who also have day jobs in the federal government like cleaning toxic spills, scheduling surgery in veterans’ hospitals and teaching in prisons — are trying to keep their small bargaining units afloat and boost their colleagues’ morale.
“Everybody is scared to death,” Mr. Trammel said. “I am sick at my stomach over this. Everything I worked for my whole life, basically — there’s nothing I can do about it.”
‘A Morale Killer’
The government employees union has for decades drawn its authority from the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which established the right to collective bargaining for federal employees. The union is racially diverse — 47 percent of members are white, 28 percent Black, 12 percent Hispanic and 3 percent Asian — and more than half its members are women.
Still, the union’s power is limited. Federal employees cannot strike, eliminating a potential point of leverage. Federal unions cannot negotiate salaries, which are set by the Office of Personnel Management along with the president and Congress. Membership is voluntary — the union is an “open shop,” and workers who do not pay union dues still benefit from many of the union’s efforts.
Even before Mr. Trump’s return to the White House, just over 300,000 of the union’s 800,000 members paid dues. Engagement in locals was varied. (That number grew to around 334,000 in the weeks after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, although the union is now shedding dues-paying members as some government agencies, like the Bureau of Prisons, stop allowing dues to be collected from paychecks.)
Despite the limits on federal collective bargaining, the union’s benefits are still tangible, leaders said. It negotiated for better working conditions and safety, remote work, and procedures for disciplinary action. Empowerment and security appeal to workers, regardless of their politics.
“At its most basic, a union is just a group of workers deciding to join together and pool their individual talents and resources to try to improve their workplace,” said Andrew Huddleston, a spokesman for the American Federation of Government Employees. “That basic pitch has probably never been more potent than right at this moment.”
While some of the union’s leaders expected a second Trump administration to be hostile to some groups of federal workers, many said the prevailing attitude among members, particularly those in jobs related to public safety, was: He won’t come for us.
But as soon as Mr. Trump was sworn in, he put the civil service in the cross hairs in the name of “efficiency” and cost savings. The administration mandated a return to office for federal workers, fired thousands of probationary employees and moved to eliminate entire departments and agencies. And he has taken aim at the unions.
One effect was a surge of support for the union. But behind the rush was an acute sense of menace, compounded by uncertainty. The changes were unpredictable, and often fitful because of court challenges.
“The immediate impact, it’s terror,” said Ruark Hotopp, a national vice president for the union whose district covers North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota and Iowa. “People are terrified that they won’t have their job in 10 minutes.” He called it “a morale killer.”
The abiding message from the White House, union leaders said, is one of contempt for the federal work force. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.) The administration has also lamented union protections for workers facing disciplinary proceedings.
“It is insulting to say that we are low-productivity public workers, that we are corrupt, that we are the Deep State, that we are lazy,” said Brian Kelly, vice president of a local in Michigan that represents employees of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Membership in his local has grown substantially, Mr. Kelly said, as has engagement. “A lot of people have now woken up,” he said.
At first, he spent a lot of time doing “Basic Union 101” in Signal chats for new members. Recently, he has been pushing for the local to talk to Michigan lawmakers.
Adding to many workers’ pain, they said, is the apparent lack of familiarity among the Trump administration leadership with what the federal work force does.
“People have no clue how government operates,” said Philip Glover, a national vice president for the union, covering Pennsylvania and Delaware. “They have no experience with it,” he added, referring to the people working at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
By day, Micah Niemeier-Walsh is an industrial hygienist for the firefighter health program within the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But she is also the vice president of a union local that represents C.D.C. employees in Cincinnati.
Until earlier this year, the role entailed a few hours of work each week. Now, she is regularly working 12- or 15-hour days.
“Jan. 20 rolls around, we realized very quickly that we needed to up our game if we wanted to survive,” Ms. Niemeier-Walsh said.
“Are we going to let them walk all over us?” she asked. “Or are we going to fight back?”
Political Frustration
In interviews, union leaders expressed outrage at Mr. Trump’s actions, but many reserved particular ire for Congress.
Mr. Trammel, in Louisiana, said he used to have a pretty direct line of communication with Mike Johnson, the Louisiana congressman who is now the House speaker, and considered him a friend.
“I even put up signs for Mike Johnson,” Mr. Trammel said.
But the line has gone cold. “I have left him several messages,” Mr. Trammel said. He added, “The Republicans that we have worked with, that we have dealt with, they don’t care that we are struggling right now.”
Mr. Johnson’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Others in the union’s leadership expressed frustration with Democratic leaders, particularly over the negotiations to keep the government funded. The deal that was approved, with backing from several key Democrats, gave Mr. Trump leeway to cut more agencies, Mr. Trammel said.
Some union leaders described internal politics and disagreements about how to go after Mr. Trump’s agenda — not only how to lobby lawmakers but how to use the courts and the public square to their advantage.
Paula Chavez, a teacher and the president of Local 3809 — a Bureau of Prisons union in Big Spring, Texas — has been working extra time to get more union members to pay their dues online, rather than through payroll. She said the union’s national leadership had been so confrontational with the White House, it had antagonized her more conservative colleagues.
“This is heavy Trump land,” Ms. Chavez said. “You can do the job and not politicize it,” she said of the union’s national leadership.
But she added that, even among the strong Trump supporters in her unit, “buyer’s remorse is at 1,000 percent.”
Audio produced by Adrienne Hurst.