On Friday, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit on behalf of eight federal agencies against the American Federation of Government Employees in the Waco Division of the Western District of Texas, targeting collective bargaining agreements that are allegedly constraining President Donald Trump’s goal of improving the “efficiency and efficacy of the federal workforce.”
The Department of Defense, Department of Agriculture, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Department of Justice, Social Security Administration and the Department of Veteran Affairs joined in bringing the lawsuit. The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Alan Albright, who is being asked to declare that the federal agencies have authority to terminate the CBAs with their employees.
“We are taking this fight directly to the public sector unions,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a news release announcing the litigation. “By affirmatively suing in Texas, we are aggressively protecting President Trump’s efforts to ensure unions no longer interfere in the national security functions of the government.”
The lawsuit was filed one day after President Trump issued an executive order exempting employees of 18 federal agencies, including the eight bringing this lawsuit, from federal labor law requirements, purportedly in an effort to “enhance the national security of the United States.” The Office of Personnel Management subsequently instructed those agencies “to take appropriate steps toward terminating their previously negotiated CBAs,” according to the lawsuit.
In a news release issued Thursday in response to the executive order, the AFGE issued a statement condemning the president’s actions.
“President Trump’s latest executive order is a disgraceful and retaliatory attack on the rights of hundreds of thousands of patriotic American civil servants — nearly one-third of whom are veterans — simply because they are members of a union that stands up to his harmful policies,” the statement reads. “This administration’s bullying tactics represent a clear threat not just to federal employees and their unions, but to every American who values democracy and the freedoms of speech and association. Trump’s threat to unions and working people across America is clear: fall in line or else.”
The president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, Randy Erwin, issued a statement Friday calling the executive order “the biggest assault on collective bargaining rights we have ever seen in this country.”
“More than one million federal workers will lose their constitutionally protected freedom to form and join a union if this executive order is implemented,” he said. “Federal workers’ collective bargaining rights are protected by law. The President does not have the right to unilaterally eliminate them. Those rights don’t just disappear simply because the President finds them inconvenient.”
The 37-page lawsuit alleges the CBAs “significantly constrain the Executive Branch.”
“Indeed, their content and timing indicate they were intended to do just that, extending for as long as five years and past the end of the President’s term, signed just following an election loss to keep a new Administration from taking charge of union relations and agency supervision on its own terms,” the suit alleges.
Calling the agreements “midnight CBAs,” the federal government takes issue in the suit with the fact that the deals have restrictions on return-to-work policies, that they “delegate important decision-making to unaccountable private arbitrators,” and that they “limit the power of the President” to “promptly identify and address underperformance.”
The federal government is represented by Emily Hall, Eric Hamilton and Yaakov M. Roth of the Department of Justice.
Counsel for the defendants, which includes three dozen local branches of the AFGE, had not yet filed an appearance as of Monday.
The case number is 6:25-cv-00119.