Only a month into his second term as president, Donald Trump is well underway toward destroying crucial rights of American workers.

Currently, the best known of these threatened rights is probably job security, for the sudden onset of Trump’s mass, indiscriminate firing of more than 200,000 federal government workers has sparked a furor. Employed by the Departments of Education and Veterans Affairs, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Forest Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other vital U.S. agencies, these workers appear to have been simply tossed out of their jobs without honoring the legal requirement of due process, including performance-based evaluations.

Trump claimed that the mass firings were necessary to save money and make the government more efficient. But the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, Everett Kelley, retorted that the firings were really “about power,” with Trump “gutting the federal government, silencing workers, and forcing agencies into submission to a radical agenda that prioritizes cronyism over competence.”

Thus, if Project 2025 does serve as a guide to Trump administration policies toward workers’ rights, we should expect Trump’s future implementation of Project 2025’s recommendations for remarkably severe federal government measures against workers and their unions.

In addition, on January 31, Trump announced plans to nullify contracts recently negotiated and signed with the labor unions representing federal workers. Justifying this action, the president said that the contracts had been negotiated by former President Joe Biden “to harm my administration.”

Trump selected an appropriate figure to undermine workers’ rights when he appointed Elon Musk as the head of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Musk, the world’s wealthiest man and Trump’s largest campaign contributor, was well known as rabidly anti-labor, and had repeatedly clashed with workers at the giant companies he owned, among them Tesla, SpaceX, and X (formerly Twitter). Indeed, by January 2025, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) had 24 open investigations into labor law violations by these three firms, including alleged surveillance of employees at Twitter and interference with union organizing at Tesla. In turn, a day after the NLRB accused Musk’s SpaceX company of retaliating against workers who had dared to criticize his employment practices, SpaceX filed a lawsuit to have the NLRB, established by Congress in 1935, declared unconstitutional and terminated.

Not surprisingly, Trump moved quickly to paralyze the activities of the NLRB, a federal agency created to guarantee American workers’ right to union representation. By firing the acting NLRB chair, Gwynne Wilcox, long before her term of office ended in 2026, Trump not only acted illegally, but left the NLRB without the quorum necessary to operate, thus shutting it down.

“We’re fighting that tooth and nail,” declared AFL-CIO........

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