Judge halts Trump’s curbs on federal-worker unions

A federal district judge in Washington on Saturday struck down most of the key provisions of three executive orders that President Donald Trump signed in late May with the goal of making it easier to fire federal employees.

The executive orders, which also rolled back the power of the unions that represent federal workers, had instructed agencies to seek to reduce the amount of time underperforming employees are given to demonstrate improvement before facing termination, from a maximum of up to 120 days to a maximum of 30 days, and to seek to limit workers’ avenues for appealing performance evaluations.

The orders also aimed to significantly reduce the amount of so-called official time that federal employees in union positions can spend on union business during work hours.

“We are very pleased that the court agreed that the president far exceeded his authority, and that the apolitical career federal work force shall be protected from these illegal, politically motivated executive orders,” Sarah Suszczyk, the co-chairman of a coalition of government-workers unions, said in a statement.

In their legal complaint, the unions argued that the executive orders were illegal because federal law requires these rules to be negotiated between government agencies and the unions that represent their workers.

The complaint said the president lacks the authority to override federal law on these questions. The judge in the case, Ketanji Brown Jackson, agreed, writing that most of the key provisions of the executive orders “conflict with congressional intent in a manner that cannot be sustained.”

The White House had sought to pre-empt this critique in the text of the executive orders, styling the provisions as mere goals that the federal agencies should try to bring about through bargaining with the unions, rather than unilateral mandates.

But Jackson rejected this maneuver, arguing that the law requires agencies to negotiate in “good faith” and that the executive orders “impair the ability of agency officials to keep an open mind, and to participate fully in giveand-take discussions, during collective bargaining negotiations.” The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In announcing the executive orders, White House officials portrayed them as a way to improve the functioning of government.

“These executive orders will make it easier for agencies to remove poor-performing employees and ensure that taxpayer dollars are more efficiently used,” Andrew Bremberg, head of the White House Domestic Policy Council, said on a call with reporters in May.

Many experts on government bureaucracy agree that it can be too difficult to fire civil servants, but they say the administration went significantly further than was necessary to achieve its stated goal.

Union officials particularly chafed at the official-time provisions of the executive orders. The White House, calling the practice “taxpayer-funded union time,” portrayed it as a boondoggle in which government employees were paid to advance the political aims of their unions while shirking their official responsibilities. The executive orders had sought to cap union time at 25 percent of an employee’s work hours.

But union officials argued that they spent most of their official time defending fellow employees against unfair or arbitrary treatment by their supervisors. After the orders were carried out, many union officials said they spent dozens of hours each week outside of work addressing questions and concerns from fellow workers.

Among the other provisions that Jackson struck down were those instructing the agencies to stop negotiating with unions over key workplace issues, such as the number of workers assigned to a subdivision of an agency or a particular project and the type of technology used to perform work.

But she did hand the administration a handful of small victories, leaving intact portions of the executive orders that inform the agencies they must reject any proposal limiting their discretion in firing a worker without first taking a set of disciplinary actions, and provisions urging agencies to consider imposing contract proposals unilaterally if a union delays in bad faith during negotiations.

Federal law “plainly authorizes such filings in appropriate situations,” she wrote.