US court will not block Trump from ending union bargaining for federal workers

By Daniel Wiessner

Feb 26 (Reuters) – A U.S. appeals court on Thursday rejected a bid by unions to block President Donald Trump’s administration from stripping hundreds of thousands of federal employees of the ability to engage in union bargaining with U.S. agencies, reversing a lower court’s ruling.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said Trump’s 2025 order eliminating collective bargaining rights for wide swaths of government workers was legitimately grounded in national security concerns.

The unions had argued that Trump issued the order to retaliate against them for challenging other administration policies, in violation of their free-speech rights. But the 9th Circuit said Trump would have taken the same action whether or not he intended to punish unions. 

Trump’s order “expresses that the President’s primary – if not only – concern with union activity was its interference with national security,” Circuit Judge Daniel Bress, a Trump appointee, wrote for the court. 

‘GREAT LEGAL VICTORY’: WHITE HOUSE

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.

The panel reversed a ruling issued last year by U.S. District Judge James Donato in San Francisco that had temporarily blocked Trump’s order. The 9th Circuit had paused Donato’s ruling in August pending the outcome of the appeal. A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., had paused a similar ruling in May that had also blocked Trump’s order.

White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers, in a statement, called the decision “a great legal victory for President Trump and his ability to properly manage the federal government.”

“President Trump’s executive actions safeguard American interests and ensure that agencies vital to our national security can execute their missions without delay,” Rogers said.

Everett Kelley, president of the 800,000-member American Federation of Government Employees, said the decision is not a final ruling on the legality of Trump’s conduct and that the union may seek review from the full 9th Circuit. 

“We are confident that when the full record is developed, we will prevail,” Kelley said in a statement. 

Trump’s order exempted more than a dozen federal agencies from obligations to bargain with unions. They include the departments of Justice, State, Defense, Treasury, and Health and Human Services.

Trump’s executive order exempted agencies that he said “have as a primary function intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work” from collective bargaining obligations, significantly expanding an existing exception for workers with duties implicating national security.

(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York; editing by David Gaffen, Rod Nickel)