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WASHINGTON – President Trump’s order stripping frontline federal employees of their lawful right to organize is a brazen, illegal attack on workers and unions, according to a lawsuit filed March 31 by the National Treasury Employees Union.

“The law plainly gives federal employees the right to bargain collectively and the shocking executive order abolishing that right for most of them, under the guise of national security, is an attempt to silence the voices of our nation’s public servants,” said NTEU National President Doreen Greenwald. “It is also a continuation of the administration’s efforts to deny the American people the vital services that these talented civil servants provide by making it easier to fire them without any pushback from their union advocates.”  

The lawsuit, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, says the order eliminating union rights for two-thirds of the entire federal workforce is in direct conflict with the law that Congress passed specifically to facilitate and strengthen collective bargaining in the federal sector.

“NTEU intends to protect the ability of frontline federal employees to stand together to improve the conditions under which they serve the American people. Federal workers around the country, through their unions, advocate for the tools and resources they need to do their jobs and help their agencies accomplish important public service missions, and we will not allow the administration to distort the truth,” Greenwald said.

The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 declared that collective bargaining in the federal sector “safeguards the public interest.” While there is a narrow exemption for groups of employees whose work directly impacts national security, Trump’s order is absurdly broad, further proving that the true goal is to fire as many federal employees as possible, weaken federal agencies and retaliate against federal sector unions.

In fact, no president has ever exempted an entire Cabinet-level agency from collective bargaining rights, only discrete offices within agencies that clearly perform primarily security or intelligence work. President Trump’s order would block NTEU from representing frontline employees in more than a dozen agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, Internal Revenue Service, Health and Human Services, and others.

None of the NTEU-represented agencies swept up by this order has a primary function of intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative or national security work, the lawsuit states. Further, NTEU’s representation of them, for decades in some cases, has never had an adverse effect on national security.

“The Executive Order plainly punishes NTEU for its legal challenges to this administration’s actions, cancelling, as relevant here, twelve of NTEU’s collective bargaining relationships, including NTEU’s largest and longest one at the IRS,” the lawsuit states.

NTEU represents employees in 37 federal agencies and offices.