Trump cannot end union bargaining for federal workers, judge rules

U.S. President Donald Trump arrives at a dinner for NATO heads of state and governments hosted by Dutch King Willem-Alexander and Dutch Queen Maxima, on the sidelines of a NATO Summit, at Huis ten Bosch Palace in The Hague, Netherlands June 24, 2025. REUTERS/Toby Melville© Thomson Reuters

  

By Daniel Wiessner and Nate Raymond

(Reuters) -A federal judge on Tuesday blocked Republican President Donald Trump's administration from eliminating union bargaining for hundreds of thousands of federal workers at 21 agencies.

U.S. District Judge James Donato in San Francisco agreed with the American Federation of Government Employees and other unions that Trump's March 27 executive order exempting many federal agencies from obligations to bargain with unions was likely illegal.

Eliminating collective bargaining would allow agencies to alter working conditions and fire or discipline workers more easily, and it could prevent unions from challenging Trump administration initiatives in court.

Donato issued a preliminary injunction that blocks 21 agencies from implementing Trump's order pending the outcome of a trial in the lawsuit by the six unions, who he said "appear to have been deemed hostile to the president."

The judge, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, said the unions had established they were likely to prove Trump's executive order had a chilling effect on their right to free speech under the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment.

He said the White House had in a fact sheet published with the order "expressed a clear point of view that is hostile to federal labor unions and their First Amendment activities," citing their opposition to Trump's agenda.

The lawsuits challenging the executive order say it was meant to punish federal worker unions that have sued over Trump's other efforts to overhaul the government, including the mass firings and layoffs of agency employees.

Unions also argue that the vast majority of workers covered by the order do not perform national security or intelligence work.

Donato noted Trump applied the national security label "to an unprecedented swath of federal agencies, including whole cabinet departments for the first time in history."

In separate litigation, the Trump administration filed a pair of lawsuits against AFGE and another union seeking to invalidate existing bargaining agreements in light of Trump's order shortly after he issued it.

A judge in Kentucky on May 20 said the Treasury Department lacked standing to sue over a union contract covering thousands of Internal Revenue Service employees and dismissed the agency's lawsuit. A separate case that eight agencies filed against AFGE is pending in Texas federal court.

(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York and Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi, Nia Williams and Saad Sayeed)