Foreign service union beats Trump in court
Trump's executive order tried to terminate the collective bargaining rights from roughly two-thirds of the federal workforce.
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A union’s ability to fight back against Donald Trump and Marco Rubio’s gutting of the foreign service just received a boost in federal court.
On Wednesday, a judge blocked a portion of Trump’s executive order that tried to exclude foreign service workers from the protections of the Federal Labor-Management Relations statute.
“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,” U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman wrote in a 36-page opinion.
An online petition opposing Trump’s attack on federal unions collected more than 178,000 signatures by press time.
On March 27, Trump issued a sweeping executive order curtailing the collective bargaining rights of several categories of public service unions.
“The effect of the executive order was substantial: it removed collective bargaining rights from approximately two-thirds of the federal workforce,” Friedman wrote.
The lawsuit brought by the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) challenged the third section of the order, diminishing the rights of the people serving the United States abroad in embassies, consulates, and other diplomatic missions.
“Members of the Foreign Service are nonpartisan, career professionals who serve around the world—often in difficult and dangerous environments—to advance U.S. interests,” AFSA wrote in a statement on March 28, the day after Trump issued his order. “These men and women take an oath to the Constitution and serve the president, regardless of party. They deserve our support—not intimidation or suppression.”
In April, the union filed a federal lawsuit and successfully persuaded the judge that the order irreparably harmed their 1,800 members.
“AFSA argues 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 ruling states. “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.”
Rubio announced last month that the department would decrease the number of bureaus or offices from 734 to 632 and cut down domestic staff by 15 percent.
The judge noted that today’s ruling could help the union fight the purges.
“Absent preliminary relief, AFSA contends that its members will be severely disadvantaged during the reductions-in-force and reorganization by ‘hav[ing] to navigate that process without their bargained-upon frameworks and without their collective bargaining representative,’ which in turn ‘will further erode the employees’ confidence and trust in the collective bargaining process and their bargaining representative,’” the opinion states.
The union reported that Trump’s order cut them off from 86 percent of their operating revenue, which they described as “crippling losses.”
Their president Tom Yazdgerdi said that the ruling would have broad ripples outside their organization.
“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,” Yazdgerdi said, describing AFSA as a “firewall against attempts to undermine the nonpartisan, professional nature of the Foreign Service.”
This article made me smile the entire time I was reading it. Thank you for the smiles, Adam!
What great news!