UNITED STATES – MARCH 4: President Donald Trump arrives to deliver his address to a joint session of Congress in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, March 4, 2025 (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images).
Starkly different views of presidential power, labor rights, and judicial review were aired in court on Wednesday during a hearing over the Trump administration‘s efforts to bust public sector unions.
“This is a really important case,” U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman, a Bill Clinton appointee, said after oral arguments were conducted — thanking attorneys representing both the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), the nation’s second largest federal union, and the U.S. Department of Justice for the quality of their arguments.
In the underlying lawsuit, the NTEU is challenging an executive order issued by President Donald Trump that deems more than a dozen agencies exempt from labor law requirements because they have a “primary function” in “intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work.” The union claims the order is a thinly-veiled effort to effectuate wider plans to drastically shrink the federal workforce by making it easier to fire workers. The NTEU also says the order amounts to “political retribution” over a series of lawsuits unions have filed challenging various Trump administration policies.
The DOJ, for its part, rubbished the union’s arguments on both jurisdiction and the merits; the government believes such disputes do not belong in the court system at this stage and, for good measure, defended the president’s prerogative with regard to national security.
