A federal appeals court is removing a legal hurdle in the Trump administration’s push to eliminate collective bargaining rights for much of the federal workforce.
On Thursday, a three-judge panel at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated a lower court’s preliminary injunction, which briefly kept the administration from waiving collective bargaining rights for employees at more than 20 agencies.
The appeals court panel had already stayed the lower court’s preliminary injunction last summer, but fully invalidated it in its ruling Thursday.
The Trump administration is free, for now, to continue rescinding collective bargaining agreements with most unions that represent federal employees.
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The appeals court, however, noted the administration had already terminated labor agreements before its latest ruling.
The Office of Personnel Management initially told agencies to hold off on terminating labor contracts with unions while the case was still pending before the court. But OPM reversed course earlier this month, when it advised agencies to proceed with either amending or fully canceling their collective bargaining agreements.
The appeals court’s latest ruling is narrow in scope and is not a final ruling on the legality of the executive orders.
The three-judge panel only determined whether the lower court’s preliminary injunction should remain in place while litigation continues. The panel wrote that its opinion did not determine whether the Trump administration exceeded its legal authority when it issued the executive orders.
The American Federation of Government Employees, which is leading the lawsuit, said it is considering whether to seek an en banc review of this decision from all the judges on the Ninth Circuit court, while simultaneously returning to the district court to litigate the merits of the case.
“We are confident that when the full record is developed, we will prevail. We will continue to build our case and pursue every legal avenue available,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said in a statement.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March 2025 that greatly expanded the number of agencies exempt from collective bargaining, after deeming their work essential to national security.
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Trump signed a follow-up executive order last August that exempted even more agencies from collective bargaining.
The 1978 Federal Service Labor-Management Relations Statute (FSLMRS) allows the executive branch to prohibit collective bargaining for national security agencies.
A group of unions representing 800,000 federal employees, led by AFGE, sued the administration and claimed its executive orders were retaliation for filing lawsuits against and publicly criticizing the current administration.
Circuit Judge Daniel Bress, in the court’s opinion, wrote that the March 2025 executive order “discloses no retaliatory animus on its face,” and that the Trump administration would have issued its executive order, even if the plaintiff unions hadn’t spoken out against its policies or taken legal action.
“Even assuming EO 14251 is over- or under-inclusive, it does not follow that the president would only have issued this executive order because of his purported retaliatory animus. We need not infer the most jaundiced, retaliatory account of the president’s actions without greater support in the record,” Bress wrote.
A federal judge in San Francisco ruled in June 2025 that the unions’ retaliation claims were “plausible,” and issued a preliminary injunction to block the administration from enforcing its executive orders.
District Judge James Donato wrote that he would not “sit in judgment of the president’s national security considerations,” but said the unions “demonstrated a serious question” as to whether the executive orders were retaliation for challenging the administration’s actions.
Donato ruled that the initial executive order’s fact sheet demonstrated “a clear point of view that is hostile to federal labor unions and their First Amendment activities.”
Bress, however, wrote that the unions’ retaliation claims relied “heavily” on statements in the fact sheet, but not the literal text of the executive orders or implementation guidance from OPM.
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The fact sheet stated that collective bargaining agreements and “hostile federal unions” were impeding national security by preventing agencies from removing poor-performing employees and addressing employee misconduct. The fact sheet also stated that “certain federal unions have declared war on President Trump’s agenda.”
The appeals court previously stayed the lower court’s preliminary injunction based in part on the understanding that OPM told agencies not to terminate collective bargaining agreements during the court’s deliberations.
But OPM recently issued guidance on Feb. 12 that directed more agencies to rescind their collective bargaining agreements with agencies. It updated the memo a few days later to state that “this guidance does not apply to bargaining units where there is a currently applicable court order preventing implementation of the executive orders with respect to those units.”
The three-judge panel wrote that this change in OPM policy “means that AFGE has shown more likely harm now than it did before.”
“OPM has since changed its guidance, and we are informed that agencies have started to terminate certain CBAs,” the appeals court wrote.
These harms would be reversed if the union prevails on the merits of its case and the court orders agencies to reinstate their collective bargaining agreements. But the appeals court judges wrote that is unlikely to occur.
Because the appeals court determined the unions were unlikely to succeed on the merits of the case, they did not weigh in on other arguments presented in the lawsuits.
“But if the panel were to consider those factors, the government has the edge,” they wrote.
The panel determined that federal district courts have jurisdiction to hear this legal challenge. Attorneys for the Trump administration argued that unions should direct their case to the Federal Labor Relations Authority, which currently has a majority of Trump appointees.
If you would like to contact this reporter about recent changes in the federal government, please email [email protected], or reach out on Signal at jheckman.29
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