The administration has said the court lacked authority to review the president’s policies.
A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from implementing its policy aimed at ending collective bargaining arrangements with employees in certain federal departments and agencies.
In an order on April 25, U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman granted a union’s request for a preliminary injunction. His order blocked an executive order President Donald Trump signed in March, as well as a related guidance document from the Office of Personnel Management.
Friedman said the court would release an opinion in the following few days.
Trump’s
order outlined a long list of agencies he said should be excluded from collective bargaining agreements on the basis that they partook in national security and other related activities. The entities listed included the Department of State, the Department of Treasury, the Food and Drug Administration, and the General Services Administration.
In its March 31
lawsuit, the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) argued that Trump was incorrectly applying a narrow carve-out that Congress allowed for collective bargaining rights.
“The Administration’s own issuances show that the President’s exclusions are not based on national security concerns, but instead a policy objective of making federal employees easier to fire and political animus against federal sector unions,” the lawsuit read.
The administration leveled multiple arguments in opposition to the NTEU’s request for a preliminary injunction. On April 11, it said in a
filing that the court lacked authority to judge the president’s determination about national security and that Trump’s “exercise of discretion here is readily supported by the facts and the law.”
The administration said the law at issue—the Federal Service Labor-Management Relations Statute—set up an administrative scheme through which these types of disputes must be processed.
Blocking the administration’s actions, it said, “would displace and frustrate the President’s decision about how to best address issues of national security, matters on which the courts typically defer to the President’s judgment.”
The guidance from the Office of Personnel Management stated that “strengthening performance accountability in the Federal workforce is a high priority of President Trump and his Administration.”
“The President believes that he must be able to effectively supervise Federal employees to take care that the law is faithfully executed and to protect America’s national security,” it
added.
In a
statement, the union’s President Doreen Greenwald welcomed the preliminary injunction issued by Friedman in Washington.
“Today’s court order is a victory for federal employees, their union rights and the American people they serve,” Greenwald said. “The preliminary injunction granted at NTEU’s request means the collective bargaining rights of federal employees will remain intact and the administration’s illegal agenda to sideline the voices of federal employees and dismantle unions is blocked.”
Friedman’s decision was the latest in a series of lawsuits involving the NTEU and other unions, which have sued over a range of issues involving employment and agency action during Trump’s second term. Another NTEU
lawsuit, filed in January, challenged Trump’s order making it easier to fire certain federal employees.
Since taking office, Trump has offered buyouts to federal employees and attempted to remove large numbers of probationary employees as part of his efforts to downsize the federal government and cut spending. In an
order on April 8, the Supreme Court blocked a lower court’s decision forcing the administration to reinstate thousands of probationary employees.
It said that the lower court’s order was based on allegations from nonprofits that lacked standing. “This order does not address the claims of the other plaintiffs, which did not form the basis of the District Court’s preliminary injunction,” the court
said in an unsigned order.
