The government called federal union contracts a national security problem – round one goes to Trump
A federal appeals court has cleared the way for President Trump to strip collective bargaining rights from 800,000 federal workers – for now.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in a decision filed February 26, 2026, vacated a preliminary injunction that had been blocking the president's Executive Order 14,251 – an order that removes collective bargaining protections from employees across a wide swath of the federal government. The decision is a significant setback for federal unions and adds fresh urgency to a broader national debate about the balance of power between management and organized labor in the workplace.
The executive order, signed on March 27, 2025, is sweeping in scale. Among the agencies it targets are the Departments of State, Justice, and Veterans Affairs, the Environmental Protection Agency, nearly all of the Departments of Energy, Defense, and Treasury, and various subdivisions of the Departments of Agriculture, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services.
The court noted it appears to be the largest single effort to date to exclude agencies and subdivisions from collective bargaining on national security grounds.
The administration's justification is rooted in national security. The law permits the president to exclude federal agencies from collective bargaining when their primary work involves national security, and the administration argued that union contracts were getting in the way of running those agencies effectively. The Office of Personnel Management backed that argument with pointed detail, identifying contract provisions that it said limited the government's ability to hold poor performers accountable, require employees to return to the office, and carry out large-scale workforce reductions.
For HR professionals, those arguments will sound familiar. The friction between operational flexibility and collectively bargained constraints is a tension many organizations navigate, and the administration essentially made the case that union agreements had become a management problem.
Six unions representing roughly 800,000 federal civilian employees went to court to stop the order, raising several claims – including that the president had exceeded his legal authority in issuing the order, that it constituted unlawful viewpoint discrimination, and that it violated the unions' due process and equal protection rights. Most prominently, the unions argued the order was issued to punish them for speaking out against and filing lawsuits against the administration – a First Amendment retaliation claim. A district court in California agreed there was enough of a question about that motive to temporarily block the order.
The Ninth Circuit, however, was not persuaded. The three-judge panel acknowledged that the White House's accompanying fact sheet contained language that could be read as hostile toward unions. But the court concluded that when read in full, the document reflected a genuine concern that union contracts were undermining the functioning of agencies with national security missions. Even if some retaliatory intent existed, the court found the government had shown the president would have signed the order anyway.
That distinction matters. Under established legal doctrine, a government action does not constitute unlawful retaliation if the defendant can show the same decision would have been made regardless of any improper motive.
The court was careful to note what this ruling does not settle. The unions' remaining claims – including whether the president overstepped his legal authority in issuing the order – are still alive and will continue before the district court. One judge on the panel wrote separately to underscore that a ruling on a preliminary injunction is not a ruling on the merits, and that the full factual record developed at trial could look very different.
The court itself acknowledged that the unions are likely to suffer real harm as agencies move to terminate existing contracts. It did not dismiss that concern, but found the harm potentially reversible if the unions were to ultimately prevail. That is cold comfort in the interim, particularly after the Office of Personnel Management changed its earlier guidance instructing agencies to hold off on terminating union contracts. Agencies have since begun acting on the order, and there is no court order standing in the way for now.
What this ruling means in practice is that the administration can continue implementing the executive order while litigation proceeds – a significant shift in how the federal government is approaching workforce management, where operational control and accountability are being elevated above the procedural protections that union contracts have long provided. Whether that shift stays contained within the federal government, or signals something broader about the direction of labor relations in the United States, remains to be seen.
