Judge orders VA to restore collective bargaining

Source: GovExec.com

A federal judge in Rhode Island on Friday issued a preliminary injunction ordering the Veterans Affairs Department to reinstate its contract with the American Federation of Government Employees, ruling that the department’s implementation of President Trump’s executive order ousting unions from most federal agencies violated both the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedures Act.

AFGE’s lawsuit, filed last November, zeroes in on the VA’s actions to implement President Trump’s March 2025 executive order, which cites a seldom-used provision of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act to strip two-thirds of the federal workforce of their collective bargaining rights on national security grounds, specifically the April 2025 decision to exempt some smaller unions from the edict and the termination last August of AFGE’s union contract, when the Office of Personnel Management was still advising agencies to refrain from terminating CBAs until the conclusion of litigation.

U.S. District Judge Melissa DuBose, a Biden appointee, cited reporting from Government Executive in which the VA justified exempting a smattering of smaller unions from the executive order’s provisions because they, unlike AFGE, had “posed no or minimal hinderance to VA operations” in considering the union’s claim that they were retaliated against for First Amendment activity. VA Secretary Doug Collins rescinded those exemptions two days after AFGE filed its lawsuit.

Read more: https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2026/03/judge-orders-va-restore-collective-bargaining/412123/