https://issuesinsights.com/2025/04/01/trump-starts-undoing-jfks-worst-mistake/
While Democrats were busy hyperventilating over the nothingburger “Signal scandal,” President Donald Trump quietly took an action that could do more to drain the swamp – and Democratic Party finances – than any other action he’s taken to date.
On Thursday, Trump signed an executive order that ends collective bargaining rights for most federal workers, a move that “is a magnitude of tenfold on what they’ve done so far on their attack of the federal workforce and the labor movement,” Cathy Creighton, director of Cornell University’s Industrial and Labor Relations Buffalo Co-Lab, told the Washington Post.
Actually, it is the first step toward righting a wrong committed by President John Kennedy in 1962 when he signed an executive order allowing federal workers the right to collectively bargain. Up until then, politicians on both sides of the aisle agreed that letting government workers unionize was a terrible idea.
Even the sainted FDR attacked the idea as “unthinkable and intolerable,” saying that “the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.”
But Kennedy needed to pay unions back for their crucial support in his narrow election victory and, once he did so, union membership among federal workers soared. In 1978, Congress turned Kennedy’s executive order into law with the Civil Service Reform Act, which had the strong support of the American Federation of Government Employees.