President’s Message – January 2025

A message from AFSCME President Lee Saunders: 

President Trump signed several executive orders that: 

• Mandate Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to create a new “merit” based hiring plan for federal workers (banning consideration of DEI in federal hiring), and, following a hiring freeze, to issue its recommendations for massive cuts to the federal workforce three months from now. 
• Roll back several Biden executive orders for federal employees that protected worker rights, sought to ban private prisons, implement COVID health and safety protections, and established diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. 
• Require some federal workers to return to the office full time. 
• Implement a hiring freeze for most civilian federal workers. 
• Ban consideration of DEI not only in hiring federal workers, but throughout federal government operations  
• Strip many federal civil servants of job protections by creating a new “Schedule F” of political appointees 
• Banning the use of federal funds at the state/local level if used to advance DEI or trans rights  

President Trump also signed an executive order to end a $2 generic drug program for Medicare recipients. While we have not yet seen a direct attack on collective bargaining rights for federal workers, the above actions indicate that the Trump Administration will be very aggressive when it comes to rolling back worker rights and gutting the budgets that help fund many members’ wages and benefits, as well as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. 

We are currently putting together campaigns to organize around some of the attacks listed above, including working to sign up more retirees around the Medicare executive order. 

 We will keep you updated as further executive orders are signed and as legislation moves through Congress.  

Lee Saunders 
President 
AFSCME