Federal union projects to lose ‘tens of thousands’ of members, court filing shows
One of the largest federal government labor unions expects to lose tens of thousands of members due to the Trump administration’s crackdown on collective bargaining agreements, a new court document shows.
The National Treasury Employees Union said in a filing Thursday that President Donald Trump’s April 2025 executive order on exclusions from federal labor-management relations programs and subsequent Office of Personnel Management rulemaking has resulted in “irreparable harm” to the labor group.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit previously ruled that harm of that kind was merely “speculative because [the harms] would materialize only after an agency terminates a collective-bargaining agreement.”
Since the appeals court issued that opinion in May 2025, OPM told agencies to terminate their collective bargaining agreements with the NTEU, and nine agencies have issued letters doing just that, according to the new court filing. Roughly half of the workers that NTEU represented before Trump’s order came from these agencies, the labor group said.
Paras N. Shah, general counsel for the NTEU, wrote in the filing that even under the appeals court’s “flawed reasoning, those harms can no longer be considered speculative.”
“After declaring their CBAs with NTEU void, agencies are, for example, shuttering union offices, cancelling all negotiations, and revising employees’ personnel files to indicate that they are no longer bargaining-unit employees eligible to unionize,” Shah continued.
The document cites two examples of agency-led changes to phase out NTEU: The IRS is scrubbing internal regulations for all references to the labor group, and the Environmental Protection Agency has cautioned NTEU members that performing union functions “while off the clock” may trigger an ethics violation with criminal penalties.
“These actions are causing NTEU’s influence to plummet in its workplaces,” Shah wrote, adding that as a dissenting appeals court judge predicted, the union’s membership “continues to erode.”
“Absent relief from the unlawful Executive Order,” Shah concluded, “NTEU projects that it will lose tens of thousands of members—a substantial portion of its membership.”
The initial case — National Treasury Employees Union v. Trump — sought to stop the firings of probationary workers in the federal government in the early days of the second Trump administration. In February 2025, a federal judge ruled against the unions, saying that the court likely lacked the authority to hear the claims.
A district court’s preliminary injunction eventually enjoined Trump’s executive order, but since then, the case has been mired in the D.C. appeals court, with NTEU continuing to fight the fallout from the EO.
