DOGE cut the fat and the bureaucrats lost their minds.
Now the same bureaucrats are fighting back.
And the Deep State is waging war against Trump and one lawsuit revealed how desperate they are.
The Deep State Put Its Strategy in Writing
The American Federation of Government Employees filed its first lawsuit against Trump the day he was inaugurated – January 20, 2025.
Same day. Before the ink was dry on a single executive order.
Democracy Forward – the left-wing legal group coordinating much of this litigation – had already mapped Trump’s anticipated policies to planned legal attacks before a single vote was counted.
Its CEO told reporters the group spent the weeks before the election preparing legal challenges against Trump’s agenda, using Project 2025 as a guide to what was coming.
This was never about labor rights. It was a coup in slow motion, filed one lawsuit at a time.
AFGE Filed 19 Lawsuits Against Trump and None of Them Are About Worker Pay
AFGE represents federal government workers. But the 19 lawsuits it has filed since January 2025 have nothing to do with wages, benefits, or working conditions.
Trump moved to reorganize federal agencies. AFGE sued. Trump moved to reduce the federal workforce through DOGE. AFGE sued. Trump reclassified policy-making bureaucrats as removable employees. AFGE sued.
Trump tried to strip collective bargaining rights from agencies handling national security work. AFGE sued to stop that too.
Michael Watson, research director for the Capital Research Center, told the Daily Signal what that amounts to: AFGE is functioning as “the representative organ of the federal civil service attempting to enact its own policy preferences through litigation.”
The bureaucrats’ preferences. Not the voters’.
The coalition suing to block Trump’s government efficiency order shows who is really behind this fight.
It included the Natural Resources Defense Council, the left-wing Main Street Alliance, and Vote Vets – an advocacy group with a long record of endorsing Democrat candidates.
Not one of those organizations is a union. Not one of them represents federal workers. Every one of them showed up to block a president from managing the executive branch he was elected to run.
What Trump Is Trying to Fix and Why Federal Unions Are Blocking It
Scott Kupor, Director of the Office of Personnel Management, laid out the problem.
The federal government has stronger tools to keep a bad hire out than to remove one already inside doing damage.
Trump’s Schedule Policy/Career executive order targeted that gap directly – reclassifying career bureaucrats in policy-making positions so the president could remove those who refuse to carry out his agenda.
Trump had the numbers to back it up: only 41% of civil service supervisors were confident they could fire an insubordinate employee.
Ronald Reagan ran into the same wall in 1981.
He gave the striking air traffic controllers 48 hours to return to work. When 11,000 of them refused, he fired every single one and banned them from federal employment for life.
The federal unions never pushed a Republican president that hard again – until now.
Marc Elias and Democracy Forward Are Funding the War Against Trump
AFGE doesn’t go to court alone.
The law firm Altshuler Berzon – a longtime organized labor ally – has represented the union across multiple cases alongside Democracy Forward.
Marc Elias – the Democrat superlawyer behind the Steele dossier, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, and years of left-wing election lawfare – chairs the board at Democracy Forward.
The organization mapped its legal attack plan before the votes were counted. It has since grown to more than 65 attorneys and launched a dedicated appellate practice in August 2025 aimed squarely at the Supreme Court.
This is a coordinated political operation, bankrolled by left-wing dark money, using federal employee unions as legal cover.
The lawyers running it were not elected. The bureaucrats they are shielding were not elected.
The man they are working to sideline was elected by 77 million Americans.
The deep state isn’t a theory anymore. It filed its 19th lawsuit last month, and the 20th is already in the works.
Sources:
- Tyler O’Neil, “Federal Unions Act Like a Deep State Against Trump,” The Daily Signal, September 7, 2026.
- Betsy McCaughey, “Democracy Forward Blocks Trump Reforms Through Lawsuits,” AMAC, July 25, 2025.
- “AFGE Still Fighting and Winning for Members One Year Later,” AFGE.org, January 20, 2026.
- “AFGE Lawsuit Update: The Latest on Key Legal Fights,” AFGE.org, August 2026.