House Passes NDAA Without Protecting DOD Union Rights, IFPTE Continues Pressure on Senate
This week, the House of Representatives passed the House-Senate compromise text of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026. The legislation does not include the language originally in the House-passed NDAA that protects Department of Defense workers’ collective bargaining rights from being revoked by the Trump Administration’s Executive Order 14251 (EO). That EO is the single largest union-busting action in U.S. history and would deny some 1.3 million federal workers at DOD and 17 other agencies of their collective bargaining rights.
Throughout the past several months, IFPTE and a coalition of federal labor unions have worked to maintain language that was in the House version of the NDAA, in Section 1110 of the bill, that would deny funding for any implementation of the union-busting EO at DOD. That language was added to the House NDAA by Congressman Donald Norcross (D-NJ) and had the bipartisan support needed to keep that language. The House passed its NDAA bill (H.R. 3838) with that provision intact.
However, the Senate version of the NDAA did not include a similar provision to protect DOD workers’ bargaining rights. While IFPTE urged leadership in the House and Senate to maintain the House-passed provision in the final House-Senate compromise version of the bill, a number of House Republican lawmakers also requested that the language be maintained in the final NDAA.
When the compromise NDAA failed to include that language, IFPTE requested that Members of the House only support passage of the NDAA if it includes the language to maintain DOD bargaining rights. On Wednesday, IFPTE and other federal unions urged House Members to vote to defeat the vote on the “rule” under which the NDAA would be considered, which would stall the NDAA and send the bill back to the House Rules Committee. While the effort to vote down the rule temporarily had the votes needed, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and House Republican leadership convinced Republicans to vote for the rule. Congressman Donald Norcross (D-NJ) then filed a motion to return the NDAA to the Rules Committee with instructions to add the language protecting DOD workers’ collective bargaining rights, but that vote also fell short. After that, on Wednesday evening, the House passed the NDAA without IFPTE’s legislative priority included in the bill.
The bill now moves to the Senate, and IFPTE continues to urge Senators to withhold support for the NDAA unless it includes the language to maintain DOD workers’ collective bargaining rights. IFPTE’s letters and communications to Congress consistently conveyed that removing union rights for DOD workers not only denies federal workers their voice at the workplace, but it also weakens the mission of the DOD.
Read IFPTE’s letter to the House urging Representatives opposing any NDAA that does not include language protecting DOD federal employees’ collective bargaining rights: