President Donald Trump sat down for a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte at the White House in Washington on March 13, 2025. A photograph of this encounter was taken by Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Sipa USA (Sipa via AP Images).
A major federal labor union is seeking legal action to prevent President Trump’s executive order from taking effect. The order aims to eliminate the right of hundreds of thousands of workers to engage in collective bargaining with their agency employers. The union argues that this move is a form of “political retribution” by the president.
The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), the country’s second largest federal labor union, filed a lawsuit in Washington, D.C. The lawsuit alleges that the president’s executive order is in violation of federal law. The order targets over a dozen agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Bureau of Land Management. These agencies are being exempted from labor law requirements on the grounds that they are primarily involved in “intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work.”
The executive order, signed by President Trump on Thursday, led to a flurry of lawsuits from federal agencies seeking to terminate existing contracts with their union employees.
According to the complaint, the order is a thinly-veiled attempt to continue the administration’s effort to gut the federal workforce by making it easier for the government to terminate employees. NTEU also asserts that Trump is seeking revenge for the union filing lawsuits that have stymied his efforts at mass firings and led to judges ordering thousands of employees who were unlawfully fired to be reinstated, as evidenced by the White House Fact Sheet on the order.
From the filing:
The same White House Fact Sheet reveals the secondary motivation for the Executive Order: political retribution. In justifying the Executive Order, the Fact Sheet states that “[c]ertain Federal unions have declared war on President Trump’s agenda.” It continues, “[t]he largest Federal union describes itself as ‘fighting back’ against Trump. It is widely filing grievances to block Trump policies.” It then adds that this union has “filed 70 national and local grievances over President Trump’s policies since the inauguration — an average of over one a day.”
As a result of the order, the heads of those agencies are required to stop payroll deductions for employees that go toward union dues, which NTEU says accounts for more than half its revenue stream. The organization is responsible for negotiating collective bargaining agreements with federal employers, lobbying for laws and regulations that improve work environments for federal employees, and litigating on behalf of members.
While presidents have previously issued executive orders exempting certain offices within agencies that clearly perform security or intel work from collective bargaining laws, “no President has ever exempted an entire Cabinet-level agency — let alone multiple Cabinet-level agencies,” according to the suit, which claims the order would leave a full two-thirds of the federal workforce without unionization rights.
“Congress granted federal employees collective bargaining rights. Congress gave the President narrow authority to exclude some agencies from the collective bargaining statute,” the 33-page complaint states. “But the President may use that authority only if the agency primarily does intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work, and only if the statute cannot be applied ‘in a manner consistent with national security requirements and considerations.’ The President’s sweeping Executive Order is inconsistent with this narrow authority. The Administration’s own issuances show that the President’s exclusions are not based on national security concerns, but instead a policy objective of making federal employees easier to fire and political animus against federal sector unions.”
The complaint seeks a court order declaring Trump’s order as being unlawful, blocking it from taking effect, and enjoining agency heads from implementing its directives.
“The law plainly gives federal employees the right to bargain collectively and the shocking executive order abolishing that right for most of them, under the guise of national security, is an attempt to silence the voices of our nation’s public servants,” NTEU National President Doreen Greenwald said in a statement. “It is also a continuation of the administration’s efforts to deny the American people the vital services that these talented civil servants provide by making it easier to fire them without any pushback from their union advocates.”
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