A federal judge on Tuesday indefinitely blocked President Donald Trump’s effort to terminate the collective bargaining rights for more than a million federal employees.
Judge James Donato of the US District Court in San Francisco granted the preliminary injunction requested by a coalition of unions whose members would be stripped of their collective bargaining rights under Trump’s executive order. However, Donato’s decision clashes with a May ruling by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, which lifted a different judge’s block on Trump’s order pertaining to another union’s members.
Donato, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, said the unions that brought the case before him had “demonstrated a serious question as to whether their First Amendment rights have been violated.” The judge said he was blocking the executive order pending a trial over the order’s constitutionality.
“Plaintiffs have raised serious questions under the First Amendment that warrant further litigation,” he wrote, adding that the unions have shown they would face “a strong likelihood of irreparable harm from the loss of their collective bargaining and allied rights.”
The Trump administration has the option of appealing Donato’s ruling to the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals.
At issue is Trump’s unprecedented executive order from March that seeks to abolish multiple agencies’ union contracts in the name of national security. It would apply to departments including State, Veterans Affairs and Justice, as well as smaller agencies such as the National Science Foundation and Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The order is aimed at stopping federal unions who have “declared war on President Trump’s agenda,” according to a White House fact sheet. It claimed the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal workers’ union, has filed many grievances to “block Trump policies.”
The unions, led by AFGE, argue that Trump’s actions are retaliation and violate the right to engage in constitutionally protected speech. Also, the suit alleges the administration is attempting to apply the national security exemption to eliminate the rights of workers whose primary duties are not related to national security.
Donato said in his 29-page ruling that the White House fact sheet was “solid evidence of a tie between the exercise of First Amendment rights and a government sanction.”
“The Fact Sheet called out federal unions for vocal opposition to President Trump’s agenda. It condemned unions who criticized the President and expressed support only for unions who toed the line. It mandated the dissolution of long-standing collective bargaining rights and other workplace protections for federal unions deemed oppositional to the President,” he wrote.
Also, while Donato wrote he would not second guess the president’s national security determinations, “a claim of national security does not, of course, automatically negate the Constitution, particularly with respect to the First Amendment.”
The ruling by Donato follows a defeat for federal workers in a separate lawsuit filed by the National Treasury Employees Union, which argued that Trump’s directive would strip union rights from about two-thirds of its members and deprive it of critical union dues that are deducted from members’ paychecks.
The 2-1 order from the DC Circuit last month said that the NTEU had not shown that it would be irreparably harmed without a court order blocking the executive order. The panel’s majority — made up of a President George H.W. Bush appointee and a Trump appointee — said the harms alleged by the union were “speculative,” in part, because the Trump administration had directed agencies not to terminate collective bargaining agreements before litigation over the order concluded.
A President Joe Biden appointee who dissented from the appellate decision said that self-imposed restriction showed the Trump administration would not be harmed if the preliminary injunction issued by the district judge was left in place.
CNN’s Tierney Sneed contributed to this report.
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