Federal Judge Blocks Trump’s Order to Strip Foreign Service Bargaining Rights

The White House said that the executive order was in response to certain unions that have ‘declared war on President Trump’s agenda.’

(Reuters/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo

A federal judge has temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s order stripping foreign service workers of their collective bargaining rights, granting a labor group a request for a preliminary injunction.

At issue is a March 27 executive order issued by Trump that barred foreign service officials and other federal agency workers from exercising organized labor protections. A fact sheet released by the White House said that “certain Federal unions have declared war on President Trump’s agenda.”

“President Trump supports constructive partnerships with unions who work with him; he will not tolerate mass obstruction that jeopardizes his ability to manage agencies with vital national security missions,” the White House said. The president said he would not let “union obstruction” prevent him from protecting national interests.

U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman, in a May 13 order, stopped the Trump administration from implementing section 3 of the executive order, which had removed subdivisions of the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development from coverage of a law that allows them to organize and bargain collectively.

In a lawsuit brought against the administration, the American Foreign Service Association had said the order “upended decades of stable labor-management relations in the Foreign Service.”

“Congress could not have been clearer in passing the Statute that it intended for the protections of the Statute to extend broadly to the covered departments and agencies in the foreign service,” Friedman said in his order.

Friedman ruled that the removal of the foreign service workers’ union bargaining agreements would hinder those employees in defending their legal rights just as the Trump administration moves to restructure the federal government and initiate layoffs.

The unions have argued “that these significant obstructions to representing its members have come at a critical moment where both the State Department and USAID have signaled—and have begun—large-scale reorganization efforts and reductions-in-force,” the judge wrote, referring to the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“As to USAID, the agency has already begun to implement reductions-in-force where employees will be terminated on July 1, 2025, and September 2, 2025,” Friedman stated.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last month that the Department of State would significantly change its operations.

“Region-specific functions will be consolidated to increase functionality, redundant offices will be removed, and non-statutory programs that are misaligned with America’s core national interests will cease to exist,” he said.

Lawyers for the Trump administration argued in a filing submitted on April 25 that the president has found that “agencies with a primary national security focus are being hamstrung by restrictive terms of collective bargaining agreements that frustrate his ability to safeguard the interests of the American people” and that Trump’s “determination regarding the public interest in that sphere is entitled to deference.”

They also claimed that the American public has an interest in making sure that agencies that have an intelligence, national security, or investigative function operate in an efficient manner.

A preliminary injunction that is being sought by the plaintiffs would instead “displace and frustrate the President’s decision about how to best address issues of national security, matters on which the courts typically defer to the President’s judgment,” the lawyers said.

In response to those arguments, Friedman disagreed, saying that administration lawyers were “recasting decisions related to ‘the general welfare’ as ‘national security’ determinations” without providing a legal basis for doing so.

The head of the American Foreign Service Association praised the court order in a statement issued on May 14.

“This ruling is a significant victory—not just for our members, but for the integrity of the Foreign Service and for the accountability and transparency of our member agencies,” the group’s president, Tom Yazdgerdi, said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.