Judge tosses Trump's federal worker orders
WASHINGTON — A federal district judge in Washington struck down most of the key provisions of three executive orders that President Donald Trump signed in late May that would have made it easier to fifire federal employees.
The ruling, issued early Saturday, is a blow to Republican efforts to rein in public- sector labor unions, which states like Wisconsin have aggressively curtailed in recent years. In June, the Supreme Court dealt public- sector unions a major blow by ending mandatory union fees for government workers nationwide. (Federal workers were already exempt from paying such fees.)
The ruling is the latest in a series of legal setbacks for the administration, which has lost in court in its efforts to wield executive authority to press its agenda on immigration, voting and the environment.
The executive orders, which also rolled back the power of the unions that rep- resent federal workers, had instructed agencies to seek to reduce the amount of time in which underperforming employees are allowed 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 sought 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, politi - cally motivated executive orders,” Sarah Suszczyk, the co-chair 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 that the president lacks the authority to override federal law on these questions, and 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 implicitly 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 flatly 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 give-and-take discussions, during collective bargaining negotiations.”
The White House, facing the latest in a proliferation of high-profile legal challenges, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.