WASHINGTON, D.C. – In November 2024, the tension inside the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters was palpable.
Two years previously, an overwhelming majority of eligible employees had voted to join the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU). They appeared to have the administration’s support: President Joe Biden had explicitly directed federal agencies to encourage worker organizing and collective bargaining.
But more than 15 months had passed since they’d begun their negotiations with BLM management, and workers at the national office of the agency responsible for overseeing the nation’s public lands still lacked a contract. On the campaign trail, Donald Trump had accused federal workers of “destroying this country,” and outlined plans to roll back civil service protections. Now, with his second term fast approaching, NTEU Chapter 341 President Panchita Paulete said that she and other union leaders were in “emergency mode.”
“We knew that it was in our best interest to get it done before the end of the term,” she said.
Two weeks after Trump was elected, BLM leadership sent the union a new proposal: bargaining a condensed agreement that addressed less than half of the policy areas the union had initially requested. It was not what union leaders had hoped for, but the clock was ticking.
By mid-December, the NTEU and BLM negotiators had agreed on language. The union ratified the contract unanimously and promptly sent it to agency leadership.
But the final days of the Biden administration did not provide the relief the union had anticipated. Five days before the president left office, an Interior Department official rejected the agreement — informing union leaders by way of the post office. And though a top Biden official went on to sign the contract, BLM management told union leaders after the inauguration that the agency refused to recognize it.
“It was just like, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding,’” said Paulete.
The NTEU is contesting the decision, and the contract remains in legal limbo. Now — facing the Trump administration’s wholesale attacks on the civil service, dramatic budget cuts and yet another proposal to relocate BLM headquarters — employees at the national office lack protections won by their colleagues at other federal agencies.
In a statement to High Country News, former Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland blamed the Trump administration for the contract’s contested status. She said the agreement “made it across the finish line,” but had then fallen victim to the Trump administration’s “vendetta against working Americans.”
Across the federal government, public employees and their unions are under attack from the new administration. But union leaders say that if Biden’s BLM had worked more collaboratively with the union from the beginning, they would be better equipped to defend their members today.
“It felt like the Biden administration passively assumed that if they said, ‘Be union-friendly,’ that everyone was being union-friendly, and that wasn’t true,” said Paulete. “Now we’re in a situation where, because of that passiveness, our union is struggling to protect our employees.”
Another employee put it more bluntly: “They left us as sitting ducks for Trump 2.”
A fraught bargaining process
In 2019, the first Trump administration’s decision to relocate the BLM’s headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Grand Junction, Colorado, threw the office into turmoil. At least 135 employees left their jobs rather than move. Two years later, when the Biden administration announced plans to move the headquarters back again, some staff felt like they were caught in a game of “political ping pong.”
All this prompted the office to unionize. In June 2022, around 200 employees — 85% of those eligible — voted to join the NTEU, which also represented federal employees at BLM’s New Mexico office and the National Park Service along with workers at other departments. Paulete said their goal was to combat “the volatility of the political manipulation of our jobs.”
The agency was publicly supportive. BLM leadership told Politico’s E&E News that they looked forward to working with the union. Speaking at an all-staff town hall in the fall of 2022, Biden’s BLM director, Tracy Stone-Manning, said, “I welcome them.”
But problems emerged when union leaders asked the agency to sign an interim agreement — a temporary deal that would outline grievance and arbitration procedures during the process of bargaining a new contract. According to Paulete, Stone-Manning repeatedly declined.
“They left us as sitting ducks for Trump 2.”
Federal employees are barred from striking, so arbitration is among their most valuable tools, according to Nicholas Handler, a professor at Texas A&M School of Law. The process allows a union to bring disputes to a neutral third party with the power to make legally binding decisions.
“The enforcement mechanism typically for a violation of federal labor rights is arbitration,” Handler said.
According to NTEU leadership, in three decades, no agency had ever declined to sign an interim agreement with one of their new bargaining units. While such agreements aren’t legally required, Handler said, signing them is a clear way to demonstrate goodwill.
“To the extent you’re committed to or want to be perceived as a pro-labor administration, it seems like a thing that would be reasonable to do,” he said.
Stone-Manning did not comment on the choice to decline an interim agreement, but in a statement to HCN, she defended the agency’s bargaining strategy.
“While director of the Bureau of Land Management, I was committed to a strong, collaborative relationship with the dedicated public servants who made up the workforce,” she said. “At every stage, my team followed the appropriate legal and procedural guidelines in good faith. Any suggestion to the contrary misrepresents both the process and our shared commitment to the people who protect our public lands.”
According to emails reviewed by HCN, BLM management told the union it was “in the best interest of both parties” to focus on negotiating a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) instead of an interim agreement. But the process dragged on, taking eight months just to establish the ground rules for negotiations, Paulete said. Under those ground rules, the contract negotiations were supposed to be finished in six months — but bargaining over the contract’s first article, which covered terms for remote work, took three months alone.
Union leaders attributed the delays to management. In their weekly bargaining updates, they described managers as moving slowly to return counteroffers on articles and argued that the management team lacked expertise in labor law. “They brought four lawyers on NTEU’s side to their knees in frustration,” said one union member, who was granted anonymity to speak freely.
Union members also expressed frustration with the decision to put Mike Nedd, then BLM deputy director, in charge of negotiations, saying he had “no trust” with employees after the major role he played in the Grand Junction relocation.
Nedd did not respond to a request for comment.
In late 2022, union leaders voiced concerns after Stone-Manning announced a plan for relocating employees back to D.C. without consulting the union. Federal law requires management to bargain with the union over changes to working conditions, Handler said: “You’re not supposed to impose new working conditions on those workers while the negotiations are pending.”
The agency eventually agreed to bargain over the terms of relocation. But two years later, in the fall of 2024, they had yet to reach an agreement.
An eleventh-hour agreement, and a last-minute dispute
Days before the 2024 election, NTEU National President Doreen Greenwald sent a letter to Secretary Haaland, arguing that BLM management had stalled the negotiations and denied employees access to basic legal protections. She requested a meeting.
According to Paulete, union leaders did not receive a reply.
But after Trump’s victory, BLM management suggested negotiating a condensed bargaining agreement featuring fewer than half of the 65 topics initially presented by the union. (By comparison, the active agreement between the National Park Service and NTEU employees at that agency’s headquarters consisted of 60 articles.)
The list did not include articles the union had requested that covered issues like “reductions in force” and performance management — two policy areas the new administration has used to cut down the federal workforce in defiance of existing labor protections. It also did not include terms for relocation. But the contract did offer protections for telework and remote work, and it established procedures for grievances and arbitration.
“There was a lot of, ‘This is so much worse than what we necessarily thought we would concede to. But if we have to keep doing this during the Trump administration, it’ll be worse,’” Paulete said.
In the email presenting the proposal, BLM management appeared to share the union members’ commitment to finalizing the agreement before the Biden administration ended.
‘This is so much worse than what we necessarily thought we would concede to. But if we have to keep doing this during the Trump administration, it’ll be worse,’
“For this to be successful, both parties will need to reach agreement on all Articles constituting the CBA as soon as possible,” wrote Nedd, suggesting a deadline that would allow just enough time for a 30-day agency head review before Biden left office.
In mid-December, the bargaining teams agreed on language. According to Paulete, the union ratified the CBA the following workday and sent the draft to the agency.
At first, union leaders appeared to have reason to celebrate. On Jan. 17, three days before the inauguration, Biden’s acting deputy secretary of the Interior, Laura Daniel-Davis, signed the agreement.
“There was a lot of relief that it was, in fact, done,” Paulete said.
But on Jan. 22, union leaders received an email from Nedd informing them that Interior would not recognize the contract after all. Interior Office of Human Capital Director Jennifer Ackerman had rejected the CBA on Jan. 15, citing two issues with the telework article. Nedd said that the notification of that rejection was on its way in the mail, postmarked Jan. 15, and argued that Daniel-Davis’ signature was invalid.
In a statement to HCN, NTEU President Greenwald contested the agency’s decision, calling the CBA a “lawful agreement” and citing NTEU’s commitment to fight “until the contract is fully enforced by both sides.”
A BLM spokesperson declined to comment on the status of the bargaining agreement.
Fighting to protect workers under Trump
Since the Trump administration began its crusade to “dismantle the Deep State,” firing tens of thousands of probationary employees and attempting to dismantle entire agencies, federal unions like NTEU have emerged as crucial champions for workers.
In late March, Trump signed an executive order attempting to curb the unions’ power — stripping workers at dozens of agencies of their bargaining rights in the name of national security. According to NTEU, the order impacts about two-thirds of the federal workforce, including BLM employees.
Though a court order last Friday overturned NTEU’s bid to temporarily block the order, it also said the Trump administration had agreed not to end existing bargaining agreements while the case is being litigated.
But at BLM HQ, employees lack even that slim defense. According to Paulete, an arbitrator told union leaders they won’t be able to rule on their contract until the legal battle over the executive order is fully resolved. In the meantime, she said, the union doesn’t have access to the protections written into the contract — including arbitration.
“We need to be in this fight,” Paulete said, noting that BLM has already lost numerous members to “fear and instability.” The agency declined to provide a total number of employees who have been fired or taken “deferred resignation” offers since the inauguration, but union leaders estimate the total number is around 1,900 people — nearly 20% of BLM employees. Paulete believes the headquarters bargaining unit alone has lost at least 50 people.
“They made it hard at every step when their presidential direction was to make it easier.”
In February, Colorado Rep. Jeff Hurd, R, introduced a bill to once again relocate BLM headquarters to Grand Junction. But this time, that barely ranks among employees’ top concerns, Paulete said.
“It’s like, let’s see if I make it across the next three bridges before that one’s even in sight,” she said.
Four months into Trump’s presidency, the top positions at BLM remain vacant as Congress and the administration push forward plans to slash the agency’s budget for conservation programs and fast-track oil and gas projects. Stone-Manning left the agency on Jan. 14, the day before Interior rejected the union’s contract. In February, she started a new position as president of The Wilderness Society, a nonprofit advocating for the protection of public lands.
“My heart is with the career professionals who are now navigating immense pressure and instability to uphold their important mission during this new administration,” she told HCN in a statement.
But for employees at the agency’s headquarters, that support comes too late.
“They made it hard at every step when their presidential direction was to make it easier,” Zoe Davidson, vice president of NTEU’s headquarters chapter, said in a statement to HCN. “If you are pro-union/pro-worker in political campaigning and policy, then follow through on that and make sure career staff is doing so as well.”
As Trump and his allies move aggressively to undermine federal labor protections, a union contract may not be the reliable defense it has historically been, said law professor Nicholas Handler.
But, he said, “If you were thinking that an incoming administration might be wanting to make life difficult for employees at a particular agency, you would really want a more friendly administration to finalize a contract.”
This article first appeared on High Country News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
