A federal court has temporarily blocked an order from President Donald Trump that stripped collective bargaining rights from the unions that represent teachers for the Defense Department schools that serve military children.
In a ruling issued Thursday, Judge Paul Friedman of the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia granted a preliminary injunction that the Federal Education Association, or FEA, and affiliated unions sought to block Trump’s order to end collective bargaining agreements in wide swaths of the government, including the Department of Defense Education Activity.
“The union plaintiffs’ declarations demonstrate that DoDEA has discontinued negotiations over successive collective bargaining agreements; ceased participation in grievance proceedings; stopped engaging in arbitral proceedings on various grievances; disallowed union representation during employee disciplinary meetings and investigatory interviews; and eliminated official time and use of agency office spaces to conduct representation activities,” Friedman, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, wrote in the decision. “These actions, taken together, essentially terminate the respective collective bargaining agreements and thus cause irreparable harm.”
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At issue is an executive order Trump issued in March that invoked federal statutes allowing national security-related agencies to be excepted from collective bargaining laws. The order applied to traditional national security agencies, such as the Defense Department, but swept in most of the rest of the government too, ending collective bargaining rights for about two-thirds of the total federal workforce.
The order gave Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth leeway to exempt Pentagon subagencies and allow them to keep their union rights. Hegseth did authorize a few exemptions, but not for DoDEA employees — despite a push from 45 lawmakers, including a couple of Republicans, to exempt the DoDEA from the order.
The FEA, along with the Federal Education Association-Stateside Region and Antilles Consolidated Education Association, filed a lawsuit against the order in May. Together, the unions represent more than 5,400 DoDEA employees, including teachers, librarians, instructional assistants, counselors and nurses.
“The executive order suffers from manifold constitutional infirmities,” the lawsuit argued. “Even if the executive order were not generally invalid by reason of those constitutional infirmities, defendant Peter Hegseth’s failure to exercise his delegated authority under the executive order to suspend its application to DoDEA is arbitrary and capricious and contrary to law and therefore violates the Administrative Procedure Act.”
The Trump administration, for its part, argued that the DoDEA is essential to national security.
“DoDEA has a primary national security function, given its role in educating service members’ children, which is critical to DoD’s recruitment and retention efforts,” the Justice Department wrote in its opposition to the lawsuit. “Because the United States relies on an all-volunteer military, the support and benefits it offers its members allow it to recruit and retain military personnel.”
Friedman, though, ruled that the DoDEA’s connection to recruitment efforts is “insufficient” to argue that its primary function is national security work.
The FEA did not respond to a request for comment on the injunction from Military.com by publication time. Its umbrella organization, the National Education Association, referred Military.com to the FEA for comment, but celebrated the decision on social media.
“We will never stop fighting for our right to EXIST!” the National Education Association posted on social media site Bluesky.
Unions representing other federal agencies filed a separate lawsuit against Trump’s executive order and had previously won a preliminary injunction blocking it. But earlier this month, an appeals court lifted that injunction.
Shortly after the appeals court ruling, the Department of Veterans Affairs, one of the agencies that had been blocked from taking action, announced it was ending collective bargaining agreements with most federal unions.
The Justice Department declined to comment Friday on Friedman’s decision in the DoDEA lawsuit and whether it plans to appeal.
A spokesperson for the DoDEA also declined to comment on ongoing legal proceedings.
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