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The American Federation of Government Employees, America’s largest federal government union, has endorsed more than 100 Democrats and a handful of Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections, while AFGE also files lawsuits to block President Donald Trump’s federal workforce reforms.
AFGE, which represents more than 800,000 federal and D.C. government employees, has endorsed House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.; Senate candidates such as James Talarico in Texas and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan; and many House Democrats, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Pramila Jayapal, and Sarah McBride.
AFGE endorsed at least six Republicans among a slate otherwise dominated by Democrats. It endorsed New York Reps. Andrew Garbarino, Nick LaLota, Mike Lawler, and Nicole Malliotakis; and Pennsylvania Reps. Rob Bresnahan and Brian Fitzpatrick.
One vote may explain this list.
When President Donald Trump signed an executive order exempting certain agencies from collective bargaining rules due to their “primary function” of “intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work,” AFGE sued to block the order. Rep. Jared Golden, D-Maine, one of the many Democrats AFGE has endorsed, sponsored a bill to invalidate Trump’s executive order.
AFGE’s six Republican endorsees all voted for the measure.
Critics say that pattern demonstrates AFGE’s role as a political actor.
While AFGE has the legal authority to endorse Democrats and Republicans who vote against Trump’s workforce reforms, these activities arguably fall outside the traditional understanding of a union that exists to secure better wages and benefits for employees.
Critics noted the Supreme Court decision in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (2018), in which the court ruled that union bargaining about government employee benefits is “inherently political.”
Michael Watson, research director for the Capital Research Center, told the Daily Signal that “it is entirely within the character of AFGE to endorse a slew of Big Government Democrats and a salting of Big Government Republicans who want to expand union powers over the federal workforce; the union’s leadership see them as the best for themselves.”
“Government unions are, by creation, always political and AFGE is no exception,” Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Committee, told the Daily Signal.
“By definition, government union monopoly bargaining grants special-interest union officials the power to ‘bargain’ over public policy and override the wishes of voters and their elected representatives,” Mix noted. Even President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “a booster of unions in the private sector, knew that government union bargaining is incompatible with representative government,” the Right to Work president added.
“The ultimate solution would be to just take FDR’s advice and eliminate government union monopoly bargaining entirely,” he argued.
Short of that, Mix suggested the government eliminate a practice that allows “government union bosses” to have “their activities subsidized by taxpayers.”
He noted that the federal government pays for “official time,” work that federal employees perform for the union on government time. He also noted that federal unions like AFGE do not have to collect their own dues, relying on “taxpayer-funded payroll systems to siphon money from public employees who often don’t even realize such dues are supposed to be fully voluntary.”
Reprinted with permission from Daily Signal.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.
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