Trump’s Union Ban Tests Presidential Power Before DC Circuit

President Donald Trump’s push to abolish collective bargaining rights for roughly 1 million federal workers faces a challenge from unions, who say he has unevenly used his national security powers.

The Trump administration and federal labor unions will square off before a federal appeals court Dec. 15 in a battle over whether the president can pick and choose what areas of government deal with national security. At the center of three cases, each brought by a different union, are executive orders making far-reaching national security exemptions to federal labor protections that touched two-thirds of the government, including the Departments of State, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs.

“This is an extremely bold and aggressive assertion of the president’s exemption authority,” said Matthew Wiener, an administrative law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s going to come down to how much discretion or deference these judges are going to give to the president’s determination.”

Trump’s attorneys say the president has broad authority to take action in the name of national security, and that the courts are limited in evaluating the president’s claims.

In a court filing the Department of Justice argued that the president doesn’t even need to cite a “particular national-security threat to demonstrate the public interest in avoiding a constraint to the president’s powers.”

Judge Paul Friedman of the US District Court for the District of Columbia, temporarily blocked the termination of the National Treasury Employees Union, as well as several other agencies impacted by the order, saying Trump’s directive violates standing law. But the DC Circuit later reinstated Trump’s ban while the legal challenges continue, finding the NTEU never demonstrated it suffered irreparable harm from the executive order.

Uneven Application

The NTEU, the lead plaintiff in one of the cases, says the executive orders were motivated by political revenge, not security. In a brief, attorneys noted that the order didn’t apply to border patrol agents whose union supported Trump’s campaign.

The NTEU referenced a March 27 White House fact sheet stating that Trump “supports constructive partnerships with unions who work with him” but won’t tolerate “mass obstruction.”

The orders also take direct aim at some of Trump’s main legal adversaries. The American Federation of Government Employees has filed more than a dozen lawsuits against the administration, on issues from the mass firing of probationary employees to the shuttering of the US Agency for International Development.

Unions aren’t the only ones taking on Trump’s orders. Twenty Republicans joined House Democrats on Thursday to pass a bill (H.R. 2550) that would reinstate collective bargaining for federal workers—a rare and pointed challenge to the president from the populist wing of his own party. It still must be approved by the Senate and signed by Trump to become law.

Administrative Exhaustion

The case could also affect the reach of the Federal Labor Relations Authority and Merit Systems Protection Board, two agencies designed to settle disputes between federal workers and their managers.

The Trump administration argued that the unions must first exhaust their administrative remedies at the FLRA and MSPB before taking it to federal court.

NTEU responded in its brief that Trump’s decision to break up the unions renders them ineligible to appear before the FLRA because his orders undermine the federal labor-management system.

“If somebody’s taken out of the union based on a national security reason, the FLRA has case law to kind of say, ‘yeah, we’re not really supposed to touch those cases,’” said Raymond Limon, a former MSPB member appointed by Biden. “I don’t think those channeling arguments are going to be persuasive before the courts.”

NTEU attorney Jessica Horne told the court “the government argues that Congress envisioned the president being able to exclude entities from the statute’s coverage while still requiring them to proceed through the statute to raise legal claims.”

Wiener, the University of Pennsylvania professor, however, predicted that the DC Circuit panel would side with Trump, based on the judges’ expansive views on presidential power in other cases.

But the breadth of Trump’s union cancellations could still invite scrutiny, he said.

“They’re sweeping exclusions here,” Wiener said. “They’re covering entire agencies than specific classes of people.”

The case is NTEU v. Trump, D.C. Cir., No. 25-05157, 12/15/25.