US judge blocks Trump administration’s ‘loyalty’ question for job applicants

By Nate Raymond

BOSTON, Sept 11 (Reuters) – A federal judge on Friday blocked U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration from continuing to ask applicants for civil service jobs throughout the government to respond to what unions described as a partisan “loyalty question.”

U.S. District Judge George O’Toole in Boston sided with three unions representing government workers who sued last year after the administration began asking applicants for nonpartisan federal jobs to write essays explaining how they would help advance Trump’s policies and executive orders.

The unions, including the American Federation of Government Employees, argued the question mandated by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) unlawfully politicized the hiring process for career government workers by attempting to assess their support for the Republican president.

O’Toole, an appointee of Democratic President Bill Clinton, said the question had been asked of applicants to positions ranging from an air traffic control specialist to a crane operator to a nuclear materials courier.

He said the unions’ members reasonably interpreted it as an attempt to determine the applicants’ political views, even though the Civil Service Reform Act bars making employment decisions for such jobs on the basis of political affiliation.

“The plaintiffs are thus likely to succeed in showing that there is no legitimate governmental interest in inquiring into the political beliefs of applicants to federal civil service vacancies,” O’Toole wrote.

The judge halted the use of the question on grounds that it likely violated the Administrative Procedure Act by infringing on speech rights under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment. 

Lawyers for the unions at the liberal group Democracy Forward welcomed the ruling, saying that over 70,000 federal job postings had included the question, undermining what is supposed to be a merit-based hiring system.

“Requiring federal job applicants to answer politically motivated questions goes against the very nature of the nonpartisan civil service,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said in a statement.

The other two unions are the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the National Association of Government Employees.

OPM did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It has previously defended the question as optional and said that it had been clear that hiring decisions could not be based on political beliefs.

It had adopted the question in response to an executive order Trump signed in January 2025 that required it to develop a hiring plan that brought into the federal workforce “only highly skilled Americans dedicated to the furtherance of American ideals, values, and interests.”

OPM in a May 2025 memo to the heads of all executive agencies set forth various actions to implement Trump’s order, including by requiring that job applicants be asked to respond to the essay question.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Tom Hogue)