A federal employee union has sued to block a Trump administration order that would strip bargaining rights at 18 departments, arguing the president abused a limited national security authority to attack unions.
President Trump last week signed an order that directed agencies to terminate already-signed collective bargaining agreements and to “cease participating in grievance procedures.”
The Civil Service Reform Act that gives federal employees the right to unionize does have exceptions for national security, but in its suit the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) argues Trump went beyond authority that allows its use if an agency “primarily does intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work.”
“The President’s sweeping Executive Order is inconsistent with this narrow authority. 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,” NTEU wrote in its suit.
While the order targets agencies it says have a national security mission, many of the departments don’t have a strict national security connection.
In addition to agencies with clear national security ties, the order also covers the Treasury Department, all agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, the General Services Administration and many more.
NTEU said that the statute may only be used “in a manner consistent with national security requirements and considerations.”
The suit, filed in Washington, D.C., comes as the Trump administration took the unusual move of filing its own legal action in Texas last week, making the first move in litigation by asking a judge to declare as legal its plans to terminate the contracts.
That suit was filed in a single-judge district in Texas, possibly setting the stage for a square-off in the Supreme Court.
The NTEU suit goes through each of the offices and agencies represented by the suit, which ranges from the IRS to the Bureau of Land Management, writing that they do “not primarily perform security, investigative, or intelligence work.”
The suit argues that the order, a White House fact sheet, and an accompanying memo from the Office of Personnel Management all reference broader plans to fire federal employees.
“The OPM Guidance on the Executive Order shows that the President’s primary motivation for the mass exclusion of agencies from the Statute’s coverage is to make their employees easier to fire,” it states.
“The same White House Fact Sheet reveals the secondary motivation for the Executive Order: political retribution. In justifying the Executive Order, the Fact Sheet states that ‘[c]ertain Federal unions have declared war on President Trump’s agenda.’”
The fact sheet said that current law “enables hostile Federal unions to obstruct agency management.”
NTEU wrote, “Neither facilitating employee firings nor political retribution is an appropriate basis for invoking Section 7103(b)(1)’s national security exemption.”
“These are nonetheless the President’s declared bases for excluding about two-thirds of the federal workforce from the Statute through this narrow exemption.”
Updated: 2:34 p.m.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
