A federal appeals court has affirmed a lower court’s ruling that most Department of Veterans Affairs employees must have their collective bargaining rights reinstated.
On Monday, a three-judge panel from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rejected the VA’s emergency request to pause a preliminary injunction issued by a lower court. This injunction mandated the department to reinstate a union contract for over 300,000 VA employees.
In March, a federal judge in Rhode Island issued a preliminary injunction directing the VA to restore its labor agreement with the American Federation of Government Employees’ National VA Council while the case proceeds. This agreement covers more than 320,000 VA employees.
Weeks later, the VA informed the court that it had restored the AFGE collective bargaining agreement, but court records indicate the department continued to deny benefits and workplace protections to employees covered under the contract.
The VA then re-terminated the collective bargaining agreement, a move that a federal judge described as “blatant disrespect” for the court’s ruling. U.S. District Court Judge Melissa DuBose issued an enforcement order in April requiring the VA to restore its collective bargaining agreement with the AFGE — and that the agreement “shall remain applicable and binding in both form and substance.”
This legal battle centers on a March 2025 executive order that eliminated collective bargaining at more than 20 agencies — including the VA. President Donald Trump followed up with a second executive order in August 2025 that eliminated collective bargaining at more agencies. Both executive orders greatly expand an exemption in the 1978 Federal Service Labor-Management Relations Statute that prevents agencies from collective bargaining if they work primarily in intelligence or national security.
The VA argued it was an “error” for the lower court to “order reinstatement of a collective bargaining agreement against an agency now outside the statutory collective bargaining framework.”
Chief Judge David J. Barron, on behalf of the three-judge panel, wrote that “the defendants have not shown that the preliminary injunction likely was issued in error.”
“Accordingly, we must separately account for the public’s interest in the CBA – which is provided for and governed by federal law – being kept in place as a binding agreement until lawfully terminated,” Barron wrote.
The panel ruled that the Trump administration did not demonstrate “the requisite ‘strong showing’ in their stay motion that they are likely to succeed in challenging the preliminary injunction in their pending appeal” — nor had it shown that overturning the preliminary injunction “would not cause substantial injury to the plaintiffs or the public.”
However, the appeals court also partially granted the Trump administration’s request for a stay in DuBose’s enforcement order. That order required the VA to comply with all portions of the now-reinstated collective bargaining agreement, including the processing of “currently pending grievances and arbitrations submitted … under the CBA.”
The VA argued that DuBose’s enforcement order “greatly expanded” the scope of her preliminary injunction by requiring that the “reinstatement of and compliance with the … CBA … shall be in both form and substance.”
“The defendants identify an irreparable harm that stems directly from the enforcement order’s ‘compliance’ directive: The district court’s ‘mandat[e], under threat of contempt’ ‘is utterly foreign to any type of labor-relation or contract suit that Congress has authorized and represents a significant intrusion on the executive branch,’” Barron wrote. “Given that the defendants have shown that they are likely to succeed on their challenge to the ‘compliance’ portion of the enforcement order, we agree.”
The appeals court panel ruled that the enforcement order means that “all parties covered by [the CBA] will continue to be covered by [the CBA] until it is terminated or amended in a lawful manner.”
“We emphasize that we do not understand the defendants, in pressing this argument, to be disputing that the preliminary injunction itself requires them to do more than simply ‘reinstate’ the CBA in name only, such that, even though nominally ‘reinstate[d],’ the CBA still would not constitute a binding agreement with which they would have to comply,” the three-judge panel wrote. “Indeed, the defendants’ arguments about the irreparable harms that they contend that they will incur from reinstating the CBA are unintelligible if the ‘reinstate[ment]’ requirements would obligate them to do no more than engage in a paper exercise of that meaningless sort.”
AFGE National VA Council President MJ Burke said in a statement that “for nearly two months, the VA has tried every which way to get around complying with the preliminary injunction.”
“The decisions of Judge DuBose and the First Circuit make clear that the courts will hold the VA accountable. No one is above the law,” Burke said.
AFGE National President Everett Kelley said in a statement that “VA’s claim that reinstating our contract would cause irreparable harm is a farce.”
“The true irreparable harm was to AFGE members who saw their rights taken away – and we’re pleased to see the First Circuit upheld those rights while the legal process plays out,” Kelley said.
A VA spokesperson declined to comment on the ongoing litigation.
The legality of Trump’s executive orders rolling back collective bargaining rights is still under review by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in February that the Trump administration’s termination of collective bargaining agreements was not retaliatory, and that the White House would have issued these executive orders even if the plaintiff unions hadn’t spoken out against its policies or taken legal action.
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