President Donald Trump departs after speaking at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2025 (Pool via AP).
A judge in Washington, D.C., has put a temporary hold on a Trump administration move aiming to take away collective bargaining rights from a large portion of federal workers in foreign services.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman granted a preliminary injunction, preventing the enforcement of a specific part of Trump’s executive order. This part of the order threatened to remove collective bargaining rights from nearly two-thirds of federal employees. Judge Friedman argued that the order was retaliatory and overstepped Trump’s authority.
The case, brought forth by the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), contests Trump’s March 27 executive order. The order categorized more than a dozen agencies as exempt from labor law requirements, claiming that the employees in these agencies mainly deal with “intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work.”
The plaintiffs claim the order is little more than a thinly-veiled effort to effectuate wider plans to drastically shrink the federal workforce by making it easier to fire workers and amounts to little more than political retribution over a series of lawsuits unions associated with the plaintiffs have filed challenging various Trump administration policies.
In his 36-page order, Friedman said the instant case was similar to another lawsuit filed by federal unions challenging the same provisions of Trump’s executive order in which he similarly granted a request for a preliminary injunction. Reiterating the same reasoning, the judge said that Trump’s order — “specifically, its unprecedented scope that seemingly conflicts with Congress’s intent”— coupled with the contemporaneous statements from the White House and federal agencies “reflected that the President was either indifferent to or acted in contravention” of federal labor laws.
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Friedman said that AFSA also provided additional evidence that “demonstrates a retaliatory motive for the executive order,” particularly, how the president treated labor unions that have supported his political agenda.
From the order (citations removed):
For example, AFSA highlights the fact that the Executive Order — despite excluding two-thirds of the federal workforce from coverage of the statutes — does not strip collective bargaining rights from the United States Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”), whose union “endorsed the President in last year’s election.” AFSA argues that “[i]f those who are guarding the border do not have national security as a primary mission, then none of the employees excluded do,” and that therefore the President’s decision to exempt CBP — which is represented by a union that endorsed him — from the Executive Order offers further evidence of a retaliatory motive.
Additionally, in the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Secretary Doug Collins was given the authority to restore collective bargaining rights to “particular unions,” which he did. The VA press secretary said the decision to “restore statutory protections to certain unions” was based on the fact that those unions had “filed no or few grievances against the VA.”
The court also rejected the Trump administration’s interpretation of the term “national security” — which it claims covers everything from “global health security” to “civilian security” to “economic growth, energy, and the environment” — as being so overbroad that it would effectively supersede federal labor laws, rendering them toothless.
“Congress could not have been clearer in passing the Statute that it intended for the protections of the Statute to extend broadly to the covered departments and agencies in the foreign service,” Friedman wrote. “It therefore is plainly unreasonable to conclude that the exclusion in [the federal labor statute] can be satisfied merely by pointing to the general national security and foreign policy ‘character’ of the departments and agencies that Congress included in the Statute. To do so would essentially render [the statutory exclusion] meaningless since an agency subdivision necessarily would satisfy the provision by nature of their inclusion in the Statute.”
