Appeals court clears Trump to strip bargaining rights from 800,000 federal workers

The court noted it appears to be the largest single effort to date to exclude agencies and subdivisions from collective bargaining on national security grounds.

The administration’s justification is rooted in national security. The law permits the president to exclude federal agencies from collective bargaining when their primary work involves national security, and the administration argued that union contracts were getting in the way of running those agencies effectively. The Office of Personnel Management backed that argument with pointed detail, identifying contract provisions that it said limited the government’s ability to hold poor performers accountable, require employees to return to the office, and carry out large-scale workforce reductions.

For HR professionals, those arguments will sound familiar. The friction between operational flexibility and collectively bargained constraints is a tension many organizations navigate, and the administration essentially made the case that union agreements had become a management problem.

Six unions representing roughly 800,000 federal civilian employees went to court to stop the order, raising several claims – including that the president had exceeded his legal authority in issuing the order, that it constituted unlawful viewpoint discrimination, and that it violated the unions’ due process and equal protection rights. Most prominently, the unions argued the order was issued to punish them for speaking out against and filing lawsuits against the administration – a First Amendment retaliation claim. A district court in California agreed there was enough of a question about that motive to temporarily block the order.

The Ninth Circuit, however, was not persuaded. The three-judge panel acknowledged that the White House’s accompanying fact sheet contained language that could be read as hostile toward unions. But the court concluded that when read in full, the document reflected a genuine concern that union contracts were undermining the functioning of agencies with national security missions. Even if some retaliatory intent existed, the court found the government had shown the president would have signed the order anyway.