Donald Trump moves to end union rights for many government agency employees – US politics live

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For beleaguered and divided congressional Democrats desperate to find an effective line of attack against Donald Trump, news that the US president’s national security team discussed plans to bomb Yemen on a widely available messaging app in the presence of a journalist came at just the right time.

The leak has put the White House and the Republicans on the defensive, generated multiple days of aggressive media coverage and forced top officials to publicly twist themselves in knots as they seek to explain – or downplay – the blunder.

It has also unified the Democrats at a time when they have seemed split on how to combat the Trump administration’s radical agenda and has even allowed some Republicans to join them in criticizing the White House. On Thursday, the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate armed services committee jointly asked the defense department’s acting inspector general to investigate the leak.

“If true, this reporting raises questions as to the use of unclassified networks to discuss sensitive and classified information, as well as the sharing of such information with those who do not have proper clearance and need to know,” the Republican Roger Wicker and the Democrat Jack Reed wrote.

Trump executive order on Smithsonian targets funding for ‘improper ideology’

Donald Trump revealed his intentions to reshape the Smithsonian Institution with an executive order on Thursday that targets funding to programs with “divisive narratives” and “improper ideology”.

The president said there has been a “concerted and widespread” effort over the past decade to rewrite US history by replacing “objective facts” with a “distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth”.

He signed an executive order putting JD Vance in charge of an effort to “remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution, including its museums, education and research centers and the National Zoo.

Trump’s order specifically names the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Women’s history museum, which is in development.

“Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn – not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history,” the order said.

Linda St Thomas, the Smithsonian Institution’s chief spokesperson, said in an email late on Thursday: “We have no comment for now.”

White House moves to end union rights for many government agency employees

Good morning and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and will be bringing you all the latest news lines through this morning.

We start with news that president Donald Trump has signed an executive order limiting numerous federal workers from unionising and ordering the government to stop engaging in any collective bargaining.

A memo from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) references an order from Trump but also provides a fact sheet, setting out the rationale for such a move, The Hill reports.

It reads: “President Trump is taking action to ensure that agencies vital to national security can execute their missions without delay and protect the American people.”

The Hill reports today:

The order targets agencies it says have a national security mission but many of the departments don’t have a strict national security connection.

In addition to all agencies with the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of State, and the Department of Veterans Affairs, the order also covers the Treasury Department, all agencies with Health and Human Services (HHS), the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, the General Services Administration, and many more.

In total the OPM memo references 18 departments while also including numerous component agencies. The OPM memo instructs agencies to terminate their collective bargaining agreement.

“Consequently, those agencies and subdivisions are no longer required to collectively bargain with Federal unions,” OPM states in its memo.

Because the statutory authority underlying the original recognition of the relevant unions no longer applies, unions lose their status as the ‘exclusive[ly] recogni[zed]’ labor organizations for employees of the agencies.

The memo also says “agencies should cease participating in grievance procedures after terminating their CBA [collective bargaining agreements].”

It has been condemned by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) in an email to members, which said the Trump administration was “illegally strip[ping] collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal workers”.

The AFGE added:

Let’s be clear. National security is not the reason for this action. This is retaliation because our union is standing up for AFGE members – and a warning to every union: fall in line, or else.

AFGE is not going anywhere. We are fighting back. We are preparing legal action.

In other news:

• Lawmakers sent a bipartisan letter to the Pentagon’s inspector general asking for an investigation into the Signal group chat in which the defense secretary texted attack plans on a non-secure device.

• Fearing the loss of her seat in the House, Donald Trump withdrew the nomination of Representative Elise Stefanik as US Ambassador to the UN.

• Judge James Boasberg ordered all relevant government agencies to retain the Signal group chat messages tat are now the subject of litigation.

• Asked about reports that 300 student visas had been revoked, US secretary of state Marco Rubio replied: “It might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.”

• Attorney general Pamela Jo Bondi directed the justice department’s civil rights division to ensure that four California universities – Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, and University of California, Irvine – are not using “illegal DEI policies” in admissions.

• Trump signed an executive order directing his vice-president, JD Vance, to eliminate “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from Smithsonian museums, education and research centers and the National Zoo.

• A Russian scientist working at Harvard has been detained by Ice and threatened with deportation back to Russia, where she faces jail for protesting the war on Ukraine.