Federal unions sue Defense Secretary Hegseth over chaotic termination of union contracts

A pair of federal employee unions have sued Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over his April directive ordering the Department of Defense to terminate most of its collective bargaining agreements. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for Maryland by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE), alleges that Hegseth violated the Administrative Procedure Act and exceeded his statutory authority in implementing President Trump's anti-union executive order.

Background

In March 2025, President 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. Since then, unions and the Justice Department have been engaged in pitched legal battles across more than half a dozen court cases.

Agencies have moved to implement the order—along with an August 2025 sequel banning unions at additional agencies—in fits and starts, partly due to ongoing litigation. While many agencies took informal steps to comply, such as canceling 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 (OPM) changed its guidance regarding the executive orders and suggested agencies could "choose" to terminate their collective bargaining agreements. OPM again changed course in February, then recommending that agencies "should" take that step.

The Lawsuit's Allegations

The unions accuse Hegseth of violating the Administrative Procedure Act by ordering the department to cancel its union contracts with just 24 hours' notice and without a plan to carry out the terminations in an orderly fashion. The result, the unions say, was "chaos."

According to the lawsuit:

• DOD did not have any uniform process for implementing the termination of CBAs
• In many cases, there was virtually no notification or communication about what actions were being taken
• Some local union leaders were informed by phone that their CBAs were being terminated
• Others were informed by email or letter
• Some received no communications at all—their agency counterparts went "radio silent" or started refusing to answer routine questions
• The memorandum "begat a firestorm of confusion and misinformation at facilities nationwide" about who still had collective bargaining agreements, and why, and since when

Impact on Exempt Employees

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 union rights only for first responders—not the dispatchers, IT workers, and other staff who work alongside them.

The lawsuit states:

"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."

As a result, 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."

Legal Context

The AFGE and NFFE 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. The new lawsuit 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 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.