A pair of federal employee unions last week sued Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over his April directive that the department terminate most of its collective bargaining agreements, alleging he violated the Administrative Procedure Act and exceeded his statutory authority when he sought to implement President Trump’s anti-union executive order.
In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order citing a seldom-used provision of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act to strip roughly two-thirds of the federal workforce of their collective bargaining rights on national-security grounds. Unions and the Justice Department have engaged in pitched legal battle ever since, across more than half a dozen court cases.
Agencies have since moved to implement the order, along with an August 2025 sequel banning unions at more agencies, in fits and starts, in part due to the litigation. While many agencies took informal steps to comply, such as cancelling the automatic collection of union dues, they largely refrained from terminating their contracts with labor groups until last August.
At that point, the Office of Personnel Management changed its guidance regarding the executive orders and suggested agencies could “choose” to terminate their CBAs. OPM again changed course in February, recommending that agencies “should” take that that step.
A new lawsuit filed by the American Federation for Government Employees and the National Federation of Federal Employees in the U.S. District Court for Maryland accuses Hegseth of violating the Administrative Procedure Act for ordering the department to cancel its union contracts with just 24 hours’ notice and no plan to carry it out in an orderly fashion. The result, the unions say, was “chaos.”
“DOD did not have any uniform process for implementing the termination of CBAs, and in many cases there were virtually no notification or communication at all about what actions were being taken, if any,” the lawsuit states. “Some local union leaders were informed by phone that their unions’ CBAs were being terminated; others were informed by email, or by letter; others received no communications at all—their agency counterparts just went ‘radio silent,’ or started refusing to answer routine questions. Beyond these ‘official’ notifications (or lack thereof), Secretary Hegseth’s memorandum begat a firestorm of confusion and misinformation at facilities nationwide—about who still did or did not have collective bargaining agreements, and why, and since when.”
The unions argued that the slapdash rollout also resulted in employees losing their union rights despite being ostensibly exempt from Trump’s executive order. While the order states that the “local employing offices” of police officers, security guards and firefighters will continue to be covered by federal sector labor law, in practice the Pentagon has continued to recognize the union rights only of first responders, not the dispatchers, IT workers and other staff they work alongside.
“Yet DOD failed to prepare any list of subdivisions that are not covered by the EO because they employ police officers, firefighters or security guards before issuance of the Hegseth memorandum, nor did the Hegseth memorandum provide for such a list to be created before implementation of the memorandum,” the unions wrote. “[Thus], across DOD, subdivisions have declared that employees who work alongside police officers, firefighters and security guards—workers in the same ‘local employing office’ within the meaning of the EO—no longer have the protections of their CBAs or any rights under the [federal labor statute], in direct contradiction of the EO.”
AFGE and NFFE’s lawsuit mirrors a similar legal challenge filed last year by the International Federation of Professional and Technical Employees, which successfully resulted in a court order blocking the Defense Department from terminating their contracts. It sets aside the broader question of whether Trump’s executive orders are lawful and focuses on how the Defense Department sought to implement them.
The unions argued that since Hegseth neither moved to terminate CBAs either last August when OPM first said agencies could elect to do so, nor in February when OPM said they “should” take that step, he was required by the Administrative Procedure Act to explain the change in policy.
“For nearly a year after the issuance of EO 14251, DOD continued its longstanding policy of honoring the CBAs into which it has entered,” they wrote. “The DOD’s April 9, 2026 decision to terminate those CBAs within 24 hours irrationally and improperly failed to explain why the DOD would no longer honor existing CBAs, or why termination was necessary within 24 hours notwithstanding the agency’s prior honoring of CBAs and the predictable chaos that would result from DOD’s abrupt reversal.”
They also asserted that by stripping employees who work alongside departmental policy officers, firefighters and security guards of their collective bargaining rights, Hegseth exceeded the authority granted him by the executive order, since the edict exempted those employees’ entire offices from its coverage.
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