New lawsuit scrutinizes Hegseth’s implementation of Trump’s anti-union EO

A fourth federal lawsuit has been filed seeking to challenge President Trump’s March executive order seeking to strip two-thirds of the federal workforce of their collective bargaining rights, this time by the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers.

Trump’s order invoked a rarely used provision of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act to strip most federal employees of their rights to form and be represented by a union under the auspices of national security. While federal agencies have waited to formally repudiating their contracts with labor groups as part of an unsuccessful strategy to get conservative judges to declare the edict to be legal, they have effectively ceased honoring those agreements, cancelling the automatic collection of union dues and ending participation in bargaining negotiations as well as grievance and arbitration proceedings.

In the months since the order’s issuance, the American Federation of Government Employees, the National Treasury Employees Union and the American Foreign Service Association all secured injunctions from federal judges blocking its implementation, though each has been stayed pending appeals from the Trump administration. IFPTE’s complaint, filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, builds on those efforts, said Matt Biggs, the union’s national president.

“Part of the deal was to see what the courts would say, and how they’d view the other lawsuits,” he said. “So when we filed this suit, we tried to address some of the prior lawsuits and concerns from judges.”

Like the other labor groups, IFPTE argues in its complaint that the executive order violates unions’ and federal workers’ First and Fifth amendment rights, and that the move to excise wide swathes of the federal government from the federal labor management statute violates the Administrative Procedure Act. But after circuit judges at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit critiqued a judge’s injunction for trespassing upon the president’s national security expertise, Tuesday’s lawsuit redirects the union’s APA claims toward Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth instead.

Those claims stem from Hegseth’s exempting four small bargaining units—Federal Wage System workers at the Letterkenny Munition Center, the Air Force Test Center, the Air Force Sustainment Center and the U.S. Navy’s Fleet Readiness Center Southeast—from the executive order’s coverage without any justification. The Veterans Affairs Department has issued similar exemptions, though it expressly said it was because the labor groups in question had not challenged the president’s policies in court.

“Hegseth provided no reasoned explanation as to why the application of Chapter 71 [of Title 5 of the U.S. Code] to the trades employees at a tiny number of department subdivisions is ‘consistent with national security requirements and considerations,’ whereas the application to Chapter 71 to all other department subdivisions is purportedly not ‘consistent with national security requirements and considerations,’” the union wrote. “[There] also is no relevant difference, for purposes of national security considerations, between the bargaining units Hegseth exempted and the bargaining units Hegseth did not exempt. Bargaining units represented by plaintiffs perform the same type of work for other Department of Defense subdivisions with similar missions or missions less connected with national security work than the exempted subdivisions.”