OPM says union agreements ‘unenforceable’ in mass firings

Union collective bargaining agreements are “unenforceable,” and should not stand in the way of mass firings at federal agencies, according to new guidance issued by the Trump administration.  

On Wednesday, Charles Ezell, the acting director of the federal Office of Personnel Management, issued a memo stating that unions’ collective bargaining agreements cannot interfere with mass layoffs being carried out by federal agencies. 

“Any [collective bargaining agreement] provisions that are inconsistent with OPM regulations or that excessively interfere with management’s rights to ‘determine the organization’ and the ‘number of employees’ of the agency, as well as ‘lay off, and retain employees in the agency’ are unenforceable,” Ezell wrote in the memo.

The memo comes as the Trump administration faced a major setback Thursday when a federal judge ruled that federal agencies must reinstate probationary employees who were unlawfully fired by OPM on Feb. 13 and Feb. 14. The ruling by District Judge William Alsup applies to the Treasury Department as well as the departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior and Veterans Affairs. Alsup ruled that OPM had no authority to direct the firings of probationary employees in violation of the law and the constitutional separation of powers. 

Separately, the National Treasury Employees Union, which sued acting Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, has asked in its ongoing lawsuit to have any probationary or term employees who were terminated to be reinstated. 

In the next two weeks, the Trump administration is expected to continue a second phase of its initiative to fire a third of the federal workforce, or roughly 700,000 employees. The firings are continuing despite nearly two dozen lawsuits filed against the Trump administration, Elon Musk and the U.S. DOGE Service to stop reductions in force. 

Federal agencies had been told to deliver plans for mass firings by March 13 to Ezell and Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget. 

The memo from Ezell now instructs agencies — all of which are cabinet-level agencies — to conduct their own comprehensive review of collecting bargaining agreements “to determine how to fulfill their labor obligations and incorporate those activities into their planning processes.”

Ezell’s memo claims that each agency has the right to determine whether to conduct a reduction in force and can exercise its discretion in determining which positions will be abolished or retained. But, critically, the memo claims that union agreements should not stand in the way. 

“Federal sector collective bargaining agreements often contain comprehensive RIF [reduction in force] articles that may obviate an agency’s obligation to further collective bargaining,” the memo states. “Because government-wide regulations prescribe a detailed, comprehensive process for agencies to follow when conducting a RIF, the scope of collective bargaining should be limited to procedures and appropriate arrangement[s] that do not run afoul of these regulations.”

Agency heads “may have a duty,” Ezell said, to give advance notice to bargaining unit employees before firing them. It also may have to give “hiring preferences to qualified employees” and provide training “to help impacted employees meet requirements of a new position.” 

The Federal Service Labor-Management Relation Statute, which establishes collective bargaining rights for most federal civil service workers, permits a labor union to request information concerning a RIF, so long as the union articulates “a particularized need” for the information.

The memo says that unions must do more than merely show that the requested information is relevant or useful, and that “satisfying this burden requires more than conclusory or bare assertions.”