A federal judge temporarily blocked President Trump’s administration from nixing bargaining rights for thousands of federal workers through an executive order the commander-in-chief signed last month.
U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman ruled that Trump’s March 27 executive order is unlawful, handing a short-term win to the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), which represents around 160,000 federal workers.
“An opinion explaining the court’s reasoning will be issued within the next few days,” Friedman said in a Friday two-page order, granting a temporary injunction that blocks the order from being enforced.
The order would limit several departments’ workers from being able to unionize and would direct the government to stop doing any collective bargaining.
When rolling out the order last month, the administration said the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 permits government employees to unionize, “enables hostile Federal unions to obstruct agency management.”
NTEU’s president Doreen Greenwald welcomed the judge’s ruling, writing that it is a win for federal workers, “union rights and the American people they serve.”
“The preliminary injunction granted at NTEU’s request means the collective bargaining rights of federal employees will remain intact and the administration’s illegal agenda to sideline the voices of federal employees and dismantle unions is blocked,” Greenwald said in a statement on Friday.
“NTEU will continue to use every tool available to protect federal employees and the valuable services they provide from these hostile attacks on their jobs, their agencies and their legally protected rights to organize,” the union’s president added.
Trump and the administration have argued that the executive order is necessary to shore up national security, while the union has said that some of the departments mentioned in the directive and their employees do not do any national security work.
“The OPM Guidance on the Executive Order shows that a significant motivation for the President’s mass exclusion of agencies from the Statute’s coverage is to make their employees easier to fire,” the union’s attorneys previously said in court filings.
