Trump Hits Court Shopping Roadblock in Federal Union Pact Fights

The Trump administration is struggling to get immediate wins from its preferred courts, after failing to score them in the legal fights over labor agreements for federal workers.

The administration has now twice lost bids to cancel Biden-era collective bargaining agreements with federal unions. The first lawsuit was filed in the Eastern District of Kentucky, home to all Republican appointees, and was dismissed by Senior US District Judge Danny Reeves, a George W. Bush appointee.

President Donald Trump’s Justice Department was dealt another blow in a ruling last week from US District Judge Alan Albright, a Trump appointee and currently the only district judge hearing cases in Waco, Texas.

In both cases, the administration preemptively sued over its executive order in jurisdictions where it aimed to get an early blessing from the courts for those actions.

In his ruling, Albright said the administration couldn’t have it both ways, as officials lambaste district judges who block Trump policies.

“While the Court understands the reasoning behind the Administration’s response to what it perceives as improper judicial overreach, the solution to perceived judicial overreach is not more judicial overreach, but a return to the principles of judicial restraint and strict adherence to the constitutional limits imposed upon the federal judiciary,” Albright wrote.

Michael Maslanka, a law professor at the University of North Texas at Dallas, said Albright’s ruling read like “judicial restraint at its best,” particularly after the US Supreme Court’s decision that curtailed the ability of district courts to issue national injunctions.

“What Judge Albright is saying is, not only I don’t give just advisory opinions, but fairness dictates that there be a record developed to determine what the court will do,” Maslanka said. “You simply can’t come to a court and say, ‘give me a rubber stamp that what we’re doing is proper.’ Judges don’t make these decisions out of thin air.”

It’s unclear whether Albright might ultimately rule to uphold Trump’s executive order nullifying CBAs, if that issue were to return to him on the merits.

Trump Limited

The Texas judge’s ruling was another victory for labor unions in the battle to protect their workers’ collective bargaining rights.

The two holdings prove to be a limit to Trump’s efforts to undermine federal worker unions. The Texas and Kentucky lawsuits could have provided a roadmap for the administration to carry out other broad workforce policies.

The American Federation of Government Employees and the National Treasury Employees Union, which were both subject to the administration’s pre-emptive lawsuits, countersued in Washington, DC, and in California where two district judges prohibited the government from carrying out its executive order.

The directive declared that workers in over 40 agencies and subagencies were exempt from federal labor law protections because of their national security roles.

But when the administration appealed those injunctions, both the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit and the Ninth Circuit stayed them. So even after Albright’s ruling, the CBA order nullifying labor rights for more than one million federal employees is still in effect as large-scale reductions-in-force continue.

The rapidly-moving litigation over the union pacts will be instrumental in how many employees challenge their terminations, according to Debra D’Agostino, a founding partner of Federal Practice Group representing government workers.

Federal workers that are a part of a bargaining unit have to challenge their RIF through the grievance process, and would need to take their claim to the Merit Systems Protection Board if not.

However, the MSPB is currently without a quorum and many workers are struggling with figuring out how to seek remedial action within the 30-day window, D’Agostino said.

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence they went after collective bargaining agreements at the same time they pushed the RIFs ahead,” she added. “It was done quite purposefully to create this chaos.”

Texas Courts

Opponents of the Biden administration’s actions often sought out Texas’s single-judge divisions, filing challenges in courthouses where they were guaranteed to be heard by a judge that attorneys thought might be more likely to rule in their favor.

Albright’s court came under scrutiny over a flood of patent cases being filed there, even drawing the attention of Chief Justice John Roberts, and leading the court to assign those cases randomly.

But other courts with single-judge divisions haven’t made changes to curtail the practice.

The Justice Department and Texas attorney general seemed to take advantage of those case assignment practices in June, when the federal government filed a challenge in the Northern District of Texas’s Wichita Falls courthouse to a Texas policy that allowed undocumented students to get in-state tuition at the state’s public colleges and universities. Within hours, lawyers for Texas said they wouldn’t defend the law, and US District Judge Reed O’Connor, a conservative who hears all cases filed in that court, soon after signed an order vacating it.

Legal experts questioned whether there was a real “case or controversy” for O’Connor to decide, since the parties seemed to be aligned. Migrant college students in Texas are now asking the judge to let them intervene in the case, a request that DOJ and the Texas attorney general both oppose.

Maslanka said it’s possible that Albright was aware of that litigation as he weighed the administration’s request to issue a declaratory judgment against the union contracts.

Michael Green, a law professor at Texas A&M University, said that even the rulings against the administration aren’t major losses because they don’t block officials from carrying out any actions.

“It is not a situation where you might directly say, well, the court is somehow trying to stop the president from implementing his agenda,” Green said. “It’s a little bit different in that, all the court is saying is, it’s just constitutionally not our role to give you an advisory opinion that if this is legal, but we’re not stopping you from doing what you want to do.”