Appeals Court Upholds Stay of Federal Union Worker Pacts (1)

The Trump administration will not yet face an injunction ordering it to recognize federal workers’ unions after a federal appellate court upheld a decision to stay it during appeal.

The full US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied a petition by the National Treasury Employees Union to rehear en banc an earlier panel decision to stay a preliminary injunction in the case. Judge J. Michelle Childs, an Obama appointee, said in her concurring opinion that the motion for reconsideration didn’t satisfy the “high threshold for review” by the whole court.

The circuit panel, made up of two Republican judges and one Democrat, paused a PI issued by district Judge Paul Friedman which had barred the implementation of a March executive order stripping union rights from over a million federal workers.

Childs, who issued a dissenting opinion on the circuit panel’s order, said in the order Wednesday that while she still believes the court shouldn’t have stayed the PI, NTEU didn’t meet standards that required it to prove it would suffer “actual and not theoretical” harms that were not “merely feared as liable to occur at some indefinite time.”

The union filed the suit after the government sued its small local in Kentucky over its collective bargaining agreement.

The executive order named over 40 agencies and subagencies where those agreements should be dissolved, saying they fell within a narrow national security exemption to federal labor protections. A series of litigation ensued, with Friedman’s injunction matched by a similar order from a judge in Northern California, which has also been stayed by a federal appeals court panel.

NTEU was represented by union attorneys. The administration was represented by the justice department.

The case is NTEU v. Trump, D.C. Cir., No. 25-5157, en banc denied 7/16/25.