By Daniel Wiessner
(Reuters) -A federal judge has dismissed a bid by President Donald Trump’s administration to obtain judicial permission to cancel dozens of collective bargaining agreements between eight federal agencies and unions representing their employees.
Waco, Texas-based U.S. District Judge Alan Albright decided late on Wednesday that the agencies do not have legal standing to bring a lawsuit to implement a Trump executive order exempting them from having to bargain with unions, as the American Federation of Government Employees, or AFGE, union had argued.
Albright’s ruling deals at least a temporary setback to the Republican president’s broader efforts to lift restrictions on firing federal employees and shrink the federal bureaucracy.
The White House, the U.S. Department of Justice and AFGE did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday.
The departments of Defense, Justice, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture and Housing and Urban Development, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Social Security Administration, filed the lawsuit in March. The American Federation of Government Employees represents 800,000 federal workers.
The agencies had claimed in the lawsuit that the administration of Trump’s Democratic predecessor Joe Biden entered into collective bargaining agreements with AFGE in the months before Trump took office to block him from firing federal workers en masse and pursuing other priorities.
Eliminating collective bargaining would make it easier for agencies to alter working conditions and fire or discipline workers. It also could prevent federal worker unions from challenging Trump administration initiatives in court.
Albright, who Trump appointed during his first term as president, did not decide whether the president’s order allows the agencies to nullify existing union contracts.
Trump in the executive order excluded agencies from collective bargaining obligations that he said “have as a primary function intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative or national security work.” The order applies to the Justice, State, Defense, Treasury, Veterans Affairs, and Health and Human Services departments, among other agencies.
A MILLION UNION WORKERS
Trump’s order affects about 75% of the roughly 1 million federal workers represented by unions, according to court filings. It significantly expanded an existing exception from collective bargaining for workers with duties affecting national security, such as certain employees of the CIA and FBI.
The administration’s lawsuit was filed on the same day that Trump issued the executive order, meanwhile unions filed separate lawsuits seeking to block the order saying it violates the U.S. Constitution and federal workers’ rights to unionize and collectively bargain.
Federal judges in California and Washington, D.C., have blocked agencies from implementing Trump’s order in lawsuits by the AFGE and another union. A U.S. appeals court in May paused the Washington judge’s ruling, and a different court is considering doing the same in the California case.
The unions have said the vast majority of workers affected by the order are not in roles related to national security or intelligence.
And also in May, a federal judge in Kentucky ruled that the U.S. Department of Treasury lacked standing to seek to void a union contract covering tens of thousands of Internal Revenue Service employees.
AFGE has said that the Texas lawsuit was an act of retaliation against the union for filing a series of legal challenges to other Trump administration policies, including mass firings and layoffs and restrictions on civil service protections for federal employees. It also said that none of the agencies covered by Trump’s order are primarily involved in intelligence or national security work.
Some of the contracts allow employees to continue working remotely, delegate decision-making “to unaccountable private arbitrators,” and limit the power of the president and agency heads to identify and address poor performance, the agencies said in the lawsuit.
(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi, Will Dunham and Nick Zieminski)
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