The nation’s largest federation of unions has put together a pro bono legal network that aims to help federal employees whose jobs have been lost or threatened under the Trump administration.
More than 1,000 lawyers in 42 states have completed training in order to offer their services, organizers said. The new pro bono group — Rise Up: Federal Workers Legal Defense Network, which was formally introduced on Wednesday — was formed by the A.F.L.-C.I.O. along with several other unions and civil rights groups, including We The Action, a network that connects lawyers with nonprofits, Democracy Forward, which has been leading legal action against the Trump administration, and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
Unions that represent federal workers — such as the American Federation of Government Employees, which is also involved in the legal network — have been at the forefront of efforts to push back against President Trump’s efforts to significantly downsize the civil service. But lawsuits challenging mass firings and other moves by Elon Musk’s cost-cutting initiative, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, have had mixed success. And litigation takes time.
With dismissals expected to accelerate in the coming months, the unions decided to add a new dimension to their legal efforts. The new group aims to provide guidance and legal support to individual workers — regardless of whether they are union members — to challenge their employment status through the agencies that they work for, as well as various administrative boards.
“We knew there would be a lot of quick and valiant legal work in the federal courts, but we knew there was a chance you’d have to go to the employee agencies to protect the workers’ rights,” Deborah Greenfield, the network’s executive director, said in an interview.
One challenge for the network and their potential clients is that some of these bodies, like the National Labor Relations Board, are themselves in a state of limbo as courts weigh whether Mr. Trump has the power to fire appointed board members.
“We are still operating as though there is a rule of law,” Liz Shuler, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said of the network’s intent to bring individual cases through the administrative board process. “We are suing when things go awry, but we are watching closely to see that the rule of law holds.”
Since January, the Trump administration has worked to profoundly reshape the civil service through executive orders, sweeping layoffs and budget cuts. Tens of thousands of workers have been fired — though some have been reinstated, at least temporarily — and others have been warned that their jobs will be gone within months. A number of agencies are soon expected to conduct “reductions in force,” a bureaucratic term for a large-scale shrinking of an organization.
The administration has also sought to cancel collective bargaining agreements and remove union protections for at least a million federal employees.
Lawyers who sign up for the pro bono network are trained on the nuances of challenging federal employment cases. The training covers guidelines for how reduction in force actions are supposed to work, and a step-by-step guide to representing an employee before the Merit Systems Protection Board, which hears appeals from federal employees over actions taken by their employers.
