THE federal government is shutting down right now because President Trump and his administration chose chaos and pain over responsible governing,’ AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said on Wednesday after the federal government’s funding expired at midnight and a shutdown began.
‘Now, countless jobs, the essential government services we all rely on and the economy powered by our workforce are in jeopardy – all because the administration wants to take one more swing at wrecking the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and throwing working people off our health care.
‘Hundreds of thousands of federal workers are being locked out and stand to lose the paychecks their families depend on.
‘Federal contractors, including custodians and cafeteria workers, won’t have the assurance of back pay.
‘It’s not Washington politicians who are at risk here – it’s working people just like us, more than 80% of whom live outside DC and 30% are veterans.
‘These are the people who get our Social Security checks out on time, keep our food and water safe, care for our veterans, and protect us at airports and during natural disasters.
‘Under the administration’s Project 2025/DOGE agenda, federal workers have been fired, rehired and fired again.
‘They’ve been stripped of their collective bargaining rights and union contracts.
‘Now, President Trump is shutting down the government, using federal workers as pawns and threatening to illegally fire them – all to avoid fixing the mounting health care cost crisis that will hurt millions of Americans.
‘The labour movement’s message to the administration is clear: Get to work. Fund the government. Fix the health care crisis. Put working people first.’
The Trump Administration Health Care Cost Spike will:
- Raise healthcare costs for everyone, including those with employer-based coverage and those who purchased insurance through the ACA marketplace, as Trump and Republicans’ Medicaid cuts and failure to extend the ACA tax credits for families force hospitals and clinics to absorb billions in unpaid costs as millions lose coverage;
- Spike insurance premium costs by 114% for some 22 million people;
- Drive up costs for the 179 million people with employer-based insurance who could be forced to pay $485 more per person per year — a nearly $2,000 a year price hike for a family of four;
- Destroy 130,000 health care jobs, which, along with those stolen by the Medicaid cuts, will total 607,000 health care jobs lost.
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OKLAHOMA Superintendent Ryan Walters announced on Wednesday that he would step down from his role overseeing the state’s schools to lead the conservative group Teacher Freedom Alliance, saying: ‘We’re going to destroy the teachers unions.’
The announcement from Walters, a conservative Republican who pushed to incorporate teaching about the Bible into public school classrooms, caps off a contentious tenure marked by a willingness to embrace culture war issues.
‘We have seen the teachers unions use money and power to corrupt our schools, to undermine our schools,’ Walters said on the ‘Fox News @ Night’ show on Wednesday.
‘We are one of the biggest grassroots organisations in the country. We will build an army of teachers to defeat the teachers union once and for all.’
Teacher Freedom Alliance confirmed Walters’ new role as CEO, saying in a post on X that he ‘fearlessly fights the woke liberal union mob’.
State Attorney General Gentner Drummond, a Republican, slammed Walters in a statement after the announcement, saying in a post on X that Walters’ appointment as superintendent led to ‘a stream of never-ending scandal and political drama’ and calling him ‘an embarrassment to our state’.
‘It’s time for a State Superintendent of Public Instruction who will actually focus on quality instruction in our public schools,’ Drummond said.
Randi Weingarten, the president of American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement that ‘today is a good day for Oklahoma’s kids’.
‘Any educator worth their salt understands it’s impossible to educate students if you don’t support teachers,’ she added.
‘Walters didn’t do that in Oklahoma, and now, at a time we need to bring the country together, he’s trying to export his divisive rhetoric nationally.’
As the state’s top education official, Walters generated controversy for ordering schools to include the Bible in the curriculum and pushing to require that families prove their US citizenship in order to enroll their children in public schools.
Just days ago, he announced a partnership with Turning Point USA, vowing that high schools in the state would have chapters of the conservative group co-founded by conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated last month.
Walters said in his announcement video on X that ‘radical leftists with the teachers union dominate classrooms and push woke indoctrination on our kids.’
Walters was sworn in as state superintendent in January 2023, and in his first few months in office, he called for prayer in schools and hanging the Ten Commandments in classrooms in public schools.
Walters has said he wanted to ‘put God back in schools’ and called the separation of church and state a ‘myth’.
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THE federal Bureau of Prisons said last Thursday that it is cancelling a collective bargaining agreement with its workers and stripping them of union rights, in the latest move by the Trump administration to gut labour protections for federal employees.
Director William K. Marshall III told the agency’s nearly 35,000 employees that the union, the Council of Prison Locals, had become ‘an obstacle to progress instead of a partner in it’.
The contract, he said, ‘too often slowed or prevented’ changes meant to improve safety and morale.
‘The whole purpose of ending this contract is to make your lives better,’ Marshall wrote in a message posted on the agency’s website.
He said the agency will ‘move forward with solutions that work, without roadblocks, without excuses, and with one goal: to make the Bureau a place where people are proud to serve.’
The union’s president, Brandy Moore-White, said ending the collective bargaining agreement, which was supposed to run till May 2029, will jeopardise the safety and livelihoods of workers who endure dangerous conditions to keep inmates, staff and communities safe.
‘We will absolutely fight this tooth and nail!’ she said.
The Bureau of Prisons operates 122 facilities and has about 155,000 inmates.
It has an annual budget of more than $8.5 billion. The Justice Department’s largest employer, it has been plagued for years by severe understaffing that has led to long overtime shifts and the use of prison nurses, teachers, cooks and other workers to guard inmates.
The agency has a $3 billion repair backlog, thousands of positions are vacant and an official told Congress in February that more than 4,000 beds are unusable because of dangerous conditions like leaking or failing roofs, mold, asbestos or lead.
In a letter last Thursday informing Moore-White of the move, Marshall cited an executive order that Trump signed in March that exempts federal intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative and national security agencies from collective bargaining or recognising employee labour unions.
A few weeks before Trump signed the executive order, the Department of Homeland Security said it was ending its collective bargaining agreement with Transportation Security Administration employees who screen passengers and baggage at airports and other travel hubs. The union sued and a judge issued a preliminary injunction in June that has kept the contract in place.
Marshall told Moore-White that union dues will no longer be collected and that employees no longer have a right to union representation during meetings with management, investigative interviews or other proceedings.
