WASHINGTON—Using the transparent excuse that lower courts are still hearing cases, a three-judge U.S. Appeals Court panel decided 2-1 along party lines to reinstate President Donald Trump’s obliteration of union contracts covering a million federal workers.
The two Republican-named judges hearing the case against a nationwide injunction upheld the White Trump administration’s argument and ruled against the Treasury Employees (NTEU) and their allies.
Judge Karen Henderson, named by Republican President George H.W. Bush, and Trump-named Judge Justin Walker said NTEU acted purely on speculation and hadn’t suffered any “actual harm” yet.
Without actual harm, the two Republican-named appellate judges also said NTEU didn’t have “standing,” or the right to sue to stop the Trump ax or billionaire Elon Musk’s DOGE chainsaw against federal workers, agencies, and programs.
The Treasury Employees had no immediate comment on the appellate judges’ May 19 ruling, overturning a nationwide preliminary injunction, in NTEU’s favor, ordered by U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman in D.C.
When issuing his injunction last week, Friedman said the president’s own words revealed that, whatever other motivations the White House might claim, Trump’s aim was to retaliate against unions that he deemed uncooperative with his agenda.
“This president sometimes chooses to explain stuff, and he did so in this case,” Friedman said during arguments for the case, quoting a White House fact sheet that accompanied the EO. The judge emphasized excerpts from the Trump brief that say the civil service laws “enable hostile unions to obstruct” the federal agenda and that “Trump supports constructive partnerships with unions who work with him.”
“So, he’s willing to be kind to those that work with him, but those that have sued him, those that have filed grievances, those that have complained against him, he’s not going to bargain with,” Friedman said. “I mean how else can you read what he’s done?”
The Republican appellate judges who overturned Friedman’s injunction justified their move by pointing to the fact that two other district courts, both in Republican-ruled states, are still wading through virtually identical cases where the Trump government is defending its order against the unions involved.
Trump has used “national security” as his excuse to trash the collective bargaining agreements covering around two-thirds of the remaining federal workers, a million of whom are actual union members. The judges didn’t deal with that rationale.
The practical effect of the D.C. appellate judges’ order is to once again set Trump free to attack federal workers, regardless of federal law, the Constitution, or actual harm to the economy, the workers, their families, or the rest of the country.
A second practical effect is to gratify Trump’s MAGA base and the anti-labor figures in the capitalist class who funds him and them. Minus government oversight, which federal workers are sworn to provide, Trump’s corporate backers will be able to run roughshod over all the rest of the country—workers and everyone else.
“It remains to be seen as to whether or not they’re going to allow employees to do the job that the public expects, protecting and promoting the health and safety of the public,” Anthony Lee, president of NTEU Local 282 at the Food and Drug Administration, told National Public Radio.
The Trump administration is expected to resume stripping the union rights of two-thirds of the federal workforce thanks to the ruling. National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System—two independent media sources not beholden to advertisers or the corporate class—are in his sights, too.
Media organizations and unions, such as the News Guild, the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, and the Communications Workers, are suing in federal court in D.C. to protect those NPR and PBS workers, too.
The Treasury Employees union “asserts that without a preliminary injunction it will losing bargaining power and suffer reputational harm that will deter present and future membership,” the two GOP-named appellate judges wrote in their ruling overturning the injunction.
“But those harms are speculative because they would materialize only after an agency terminates a collective bargaining agreement, and the government directed agencies to refrain from terminating collective bargaining agreements or decertifying bargaining units until after the litigation concludes.”
The catch is that despite the preliminary injunction ordered by Judge Friedman in the lower court, Trump and especially Musk have been firing more workers from some agencies, especially the Labor Department, and locking other workers out of their offices with literally no notice at all.
Those latter workers came to their jobs in recent days, inserted their key cards into readers at each entrance and waited for the usual green light to let them enter their buildings. The light stayed red; that’s when they found out they had been arbitrarily fired.
The two appellate judges in the majority also said Trump would suffer “an irreparable injury” by having his hands tied by union limits on his “national security prerogatives.” But they rejected NTEU’s very real “irreparable injury” from lost members, revenues, and ability to bargain on behalf of workers.
District Judge Friedman’s “injunction eliminates the president’s control over the decision to pause implementation of the executive order and, by consequence, his flexibility to respond to future developments, at least without returning to the district court,” they wrote. “In other words, the preliminary injunction ties the government’s hands.”
Appellate Judge J. Michelle Childs, named by Democratic President Joe Biden, dissented.
“In one brief paragraph, the government claims a stay” of Judge Friedman’s injunction “would protect the president’s ability ‘to guarantee the effective operation of the agencies relevant to national security without the constraints of collective bargaining,’” Judge Childs wrote.
“But the district court’s injunction maintains the state of affairs that has existed for nearly half a century: NTEU has bargained on behalf of federal workers since the 1970s. The government does not explain why irreparable injury will result from continuing this decades-long practice for a short period of time while we adjudicate the merits of this appeal.”
This loss for unions at the Appeals Court level is the latest but not the last battle in labor’s struggle to halt the Trump administration’s assault on federal workers. There are the cases already pending in other courts, and more are expected to be filed.
C.J. Atkins contributed to this article.
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