President Donald Trump has issued an executive order aimed at ending collective bargaining privileges for government union employees. But it faces legal challenges, and as that case works its way to the Supreme Court for a decision that the president will probably lose, he and leaders in Congress are taking steps to build a coalition to minimize the fiscal damage unions inflict on federal taxpayers.

As these pages have detailed before, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, he specifically did not grant government employees the same collective bargaining rights that he wanted to create for private sector workers.