A federal appeals court on Friday allowed President Trump to move forward with an order instructing a broad swath of government agencies to end collective bargaining with federal unions.
The ruling authorizes a component of Mr. Trump’s sweeping effort to assert more control over the federal work force to move forward, for now, while the case plays out in court.
It is unclear what immediate effect the ruling will have: The appeals court noted that the affected agencies had been directed to refrain from ending any collective bargaining agreement until “litigation has concluded,” but also noted that Mr. Trump was now free to follow through with the order at his discretion.
Mr. Trump had framed his order stripping workers of labor protections as critical to protect national security. But the plaintiffs — a group of affected unions representing over a million federal workers — argued in a lawsuit that the order was a form of retaliation against those unions that have participated in a barrage of lawsuits opposing Mr. Trump’s policies.
The unions pointed to statements from the White House justifying the order that said “certain federal unions have declared war on President Trump’s agenda” and that the president “will not tolerate mass obstruction that jeopardizes his ability to manage agencies with vital national security missions.”
But a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, a famously liberal jurisdiction, ruled in Mr. Trump’s favor, writing that “the government has shown that the president would have taken the same action even in the absence” of the union lawsuits. Even if some of the White House’s statements “reflect a degree of retaliatory animus,” they wrote, those statements, taken as a whole, also demonstrate “the president’s focus on national security.”
The unions had also argued that the order broadly targeted agencies across the government, some of which had no obvious national security portfolio — including the Department of Health and Human Services and the Environmental Protection Agency — using national security as a pretext to strip the unions of their power.
The panel sidestepped that claim, writing in the 15-page ruling that “we question whether we can take up such arguments, which invite us to assess whether the president’s stated reasons for exercising national security authority — clearly conferred to him by statute — were pretextual.”
The order, they continued, “conveys the president’s determination that the excluded agencies have primary functions implicating national security.”