Trump Strips Federal Worker Union Rights as Legal Fights Drag On

Federal agencies are redoubling efforts to dismantle their workers’ collective bargaining rights with the Trump administration mostly shielded while courts weigh unions’ array of legal challenges to the president’s authority.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration canceled contracts for certain workers at the Internal Revenue Service, the Office of Comptroller of the Currency, and the Department of Energy.

The contract dissolutions come after the US Office of Personnel Management, the human resource arm of the government, instructed agencies to formally begin stripping federal workers of their collective bargaining rights, part of a pair of executive orders President Donald Trump issued last year.

To stop the cancellations, the unions must convince courts that Trump misinterpreted the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 by citing national security concerns as a reason to dissolve union contracts, an increasingly high bar for a federal judiciary that historically defers to presidential national security powers.

“The limited historical precedent we have suggests that the president usually doesn’t get second guessed on these determinations,” said Nicholas Handler, associate professor at Texas A&M University School of Law. “But on the other hand, we now have a use of this authority that is just wildly, wildly out of step with how presidents of either party have used this authority in the past.”

Over 1 million workers stand to lose their bargaining rights, posing a potentially existential threat to public sector unions that rely on high membership to block the Trump administration’s efforts to reshape the federal workforce.

With fewer members, the unions’ ability to challenge the Trump administration could be diminished, legal labor observers said.

“AFGE continues to challenge President Trump’s anti-union executive orders in court and in Congress,” Everett Kelley, National President for the American Federation of Government Employees said in a statement. “Our union remains hard at work organizing, representing, and defending federal employees in every workplace affected by these orders.”

A spokesperson for the National Treasury Employees Union declined to comment. While AFGE and NTEU have led the litigation effort against the orders, the AFL-CIO and other bargaining units have also been involved.

Flurry of Lawsuits

Trump signed the executive orders in March and August of 2025, respectively, citing national security concerns to nullify roughly two thirds of the federal workforce’s union contracts. The unions have filed roughly a dozen lawsuits to reverse those policies.

While the groups scored early wins at the district court level, federal appeals courts have been more skeptical, overturning preliminary injunctions that were keeping the bargaining agreements in place.

The unions face two primary legal challenges: They must prove that the president misapplied his national security powers and that the case should be decided in federal court and not before the Federal Labor Relations Authority.

The issue of jurisdiction appears to have divided appellate courts.

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled last month that, since the executive order exempted unions from the statute establishing the FLRA, the federal judiciary has jurisdiction over the case.

During oral arguments in December, however, the DC Circuit seemed to back the Trump administration’s argument that the unions should first pursue relief through the federal labor mediation board before going to court.

A circuit split could prompt intervention by the US Supreme Court, attorneys said.

The unions will need to prove “it’s a waste of time to go through the agency process because ultimately the issues on which the litigation is going to turn aren’t really about the kind of finer technical points of federal sector labor law,” Handler said. “It’s about bigger questions of constitutional and statutory authority.”

Merits Issues

If the unions are successful in convincing courts they have jurisdiction over the case, labor groups will then have to prove that Trump abused his national security powers.

While appeals courts have yet to fully rule on the merits, they tend to be relatively skeptical toward challenges to presidential national security power, attorneys said.

Trump’s public comments about the unions could undermine the administration’s claims that the cancellations were based on national security.

A public fact sheet released by the White House refers to the labor groups as “hostile” unions that have “declared war on President Trump’s agenda.”

“Federal courts feel like they are not empowered to question the president” on national security matters, said Suzanne Summerlin, an attorney specializing in the federal workforce.

“However, if there were ever a set of facts that a reasonable person could look at and say this is a disingenuous application of national security powers,” it’s these, she said.

If unions are unable to convince the courts that the president abused his national security powers, they could turn to the Administrative Procedure Act to claim individual agencies acted arbitrarily when canceling bargaining agreements, said Michael Fallings, managing partner at Tully Rinckey PLLC.

The unions “would have to argue that the actions taken by the government are arbitrary and not in line with federal regulations and precedent,” he said. “Those are usually tougher claims.”

Injunction Concerns

Without success in court, unions will have a harder time blocking the Trump administration’s efforts to reshape the federal workforce, labor observers said.

If the administration is successful in canceling contracts, federal courts could be more limited in who they can order relief for in layoff cases, attorneys said.

That’s especially true after the Supreme Court curbed district courts’ ability to issue universal injunctions last year in Trump v. Casa.

Whether a judge could apply a preliminary injunction to a decertified unit will ultimately have to be decided in court, Summerlin said.

“You can still be a union member, even if you’re not in the bargaining unit,” Summerlin said. But whether an injunction would apply “is a really complicated legal question that those lawyers are ultimately going to have to figure out with the judge.”