There’s a fundamental question at the heart of public-sector unionism that no one seems to ask: Do these unions work for We the People, or do We the People work for them?

Sadly, it’s the latter. But Donald Trump has decided to do something about it.

Last week, Trump issued an executive order exempting federal agencies with national security missions from engaging in the collective bargaining process. This means that the affected agencies won’t be able to hold the federal government and the American people hostage during contract negotiations. Unless, of course, the Despotic Branch gets involved.

“President Trump,” according to the memo, “is taking action to ensure that agencies vital to national security can execute their missions without delay and protect the American people.” Trump is also reining in a unionized federal workforce whose ranks continue to grow. As The Washington Post reports:

The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal workers’ union representing more than 800,000 members, estimates that hundreds of thousands of federal workers could lose their union rights under the order and has pledged to take immediate legal action, alongside other unions. The unions had not filed lawsuits as of Friday evening.

Public sector unions represent about 1.25 million workers in the federal government’s 2.3 million-person bureaucracy, according to Labor Department data.

Trump claims his authority under the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which even allows the cancelation of union contracts. The agencies affected by his executive order include those broadly related to national defense, such as Veterans Affairs and the National Science Foundation; border security, such as Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement; foreign relations, such as the State Department, USAID, and the International Trade Commission; energy security, such as the Energy and Interior Departments, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the EPA; pandemic preparedness, such as the CDC and the FDA; cybersecurity, such as the Federal Communications Commission and the General Services Administration; economic defense, such as the Treasury Department; and public safety, such as the DOJ and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

But here’s an odd and interesting carveout: law enforcement. As the order states, “Police and firefighters will continue to collectively bargain.”

How police and firefighters aren’t included under Trump’s expansive national-security umbrella but the EPA and the Department of the Interior, for example, are included is somewhat curious — until we consider the politics of the exemption. Trump received the endorsements of numerous law enforcement organizations in the run-up to the 2024 election. And while the firefighters’ union didn’t endorse Trump, it did refrain from endorsing Kamala Harris, unlike in 2020, when the firefighters endorsed Joe Biden.

As for public-sector unions, there used to be widespread agreement across the political spectrum that these entities were incompatible with good government. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, an unabashed Big Government leftist and a strong trade union supporter, was nonetheless a vocal critic of government unions. “The paralysis of government by those who have sworn to support it,” he said, “is unthinkable and intolerable.”

Even the AFL-CIO’s first president, George Meany, said it was “impossible to bargain collectively with the government.”

Collective bargaining is, of course, at the heart of traditional unionism. But public-sector unions are not traditional unions. That’s why they weren’t even allowed to collectively bargain until 1962, when John F. Kennedy signed a disastrous executive order that introduced collective bargaining into the federal workforce.

Public-sector unions — which can be better understood as government employee unions — have long benefited from this untenable relationship in the bargaining process: They ultimately sit on both sides of the bargaining table. This is why they’re able to extract concessions without any regard for the health and well-being of their employer, which is the American people. As author Philip Howard writes:

American government has a fatal flaw hiding in plain sight. Public employee unions in most states have a stranglehold on public operations. Voters elect governors and mayors who have been disempowered from fixing lousy schools, firing rogue cops, or eliminating notorious inefficiencies. …

Public unions have turned public operations into a permanent spoils system: Unions have control over public operations and have insulated public employees from accountability, no matter how poorly they perform. That’s why democratically elected leaders almost never fix what’s broken.

Howard ought to know. He literally wrote the book on the corrupting influence of public-sector unions.

As for President Trump’s executive order, it’s a good first salvo, but just as with the more than 100 other such orders he’s issued, it doesn’t have the permanency of law. That’s why, if we’re to fix our badly broken public-sector union system, we need to do so via Rule of Law, and that requires the legislative branch.