President Donald Trump’s efforts to streamline the federal workforce and tame the bureaucracy have hit early snags as blue-state federal district judges side with the unions challenging the president’s actions. Whether the reforms ultimately succeed will likely depend on how higher courts rule. On that score, the Supreme Court handed the administration an early victory when, in an 8-1 decision Tuesday, it dissolved a California judge’s injunction blocking a Trump executive order directing agencies to plan for headcount reductions.

But as the union-administration slugfest plays out in court, it’s worth celebrating a pro-worker reform from Trump’s first term that quietly survived Joe Biden’s presidency and, consequently, doesn’t need to be relitigated now.

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For decades, federal workers who chose to become union members faced strict limitations on their ability to cancel their membership. At the heart of the matter is a federal law requiring federal agencies to collect union dues from the wages of those federal workers who authorize it. The statute at issue provides that, once a federal worker authorizes union dues deductions, the authorization “may not be revoked for a period of 1 year.”

Despite the fact that the statute clearly describes a single year, the Federal Labor Relations Authority in a 1981 decision interpreted the law to mean that “authorized dues allotments may be revoked only at intervals of 1 year.”

The FLRA’s mangled reinterpretation of the statute allowed federal unions to impose an array of extreme, arbitrary limits on when federal employees could cancel union deductions.

For example, one collective bargaining agreement between the Department of Homeland Security and the International Association of Machinists provided that “the employee’s annual revocation period will be during the ten (10) calendar day period … preceding the anniversary date of the employee’s signing up for dues withholding.”

At the most extreme, some collective bargaining agreements instituted one-day-per-year revocation windows, with a union contract at the Agriculture Department reading, “An employee may cancel dues withholding once per year on their anniversary date by submitting the appropriate designated form to the union.”

Thankfully, in the last year of the first Trump administration, the FLRA reversed its 1981 decision and adopted a regulation that, in alignment with the statute, allows federal workers who have paid dues for at least one year to cancel unwanted union dues deductions at any time.

However, given Biden’s oft-stated desire to be the most pro-union president in history, it was perhaps unsurprising that the FLRA in 2022 proposed rescinding the Trump regulation and again allowing unions to sharply curtail membership cancellations.

In addition to clearly contradicting the statute, the Biden FLRA’s policy arguments were predictably misguided.

The agency, to cite one example, adopted a union talking point that imposing annual revocation windows would “restore financial security and predictability for unions” because it would allow unions and agencies to efficiently “process revocations all at once,” rather than “one by [one] throughout the year.”

In comments opposing the reversal, critics, including the Freedom Foundation, cited numerous examples demonstrating how federal union contracts commonly establish individualized, not standardized, membership cancellation windows because unions prefer making it as difficult as possible for employees to opt out of the union.

Two years later, Trump was sworn in as the 47th president without the FLRA having taken any further action on its misguided and indefensible proposal.

As a result, federal employees today continue to have more control over their paychecks, and there is one less item on the administration’s to-do list.

Of course, there’s little justification for forcing taxpayers to fundraise for overtly political private special interests such as federal unions in the first place. But getting the federal government out of the union dues collection business entirely will require congressional action.

CONGRESS TRIES TO BAN INSIDER TRADING BY ITS MEMBERS

To that end, Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-MT) recently introduced the Paycheck Protection Act, which would prohibit federal agencies from using public personnel and payroll systems to deduct union dues or political contributions from federal employees’ wages. That would give government workers even more control over their union membership.

For now, while it may not have generated headlines, stopping Biden’s attempt to trap federal workers in unions was a welcome win for freedom.

Maxford Nelsen is the director of research and government affairs at the Freedom Foundation. From 2019 to 2021, he served as a presidential appointee to the Federal Service Impasses Panel at the Federal Labor Relations Authority.