By Daniel Wiessner
(Reuters) -Two major unions representing U.S. government employees filed a lawsuit on Wednesday aimed at slowing President Donald Trump’s effort to reclassify up to 50,000 federal workers and make it easier to fire them.
The American Federation of Government Employees and American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees said Trump in a Jan. 20 executive order improperly attempted to block a Biden administration rule shielding federal workers from being stripped of job protections.
During past presidential administrations, a few thousand federal jobs have been considered political appointments.
Trump’s order exempts positions “of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character,” creating a new much larger category of federal employees who do not have the typical protections enjoyed by civil servants and can be fired at will. It also directs the U.S. Office of Personnel Management to repeal the Biden administration rule and says the regulation will be “inoperative” until then.
The unions in the lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington, D.C. said OPM can only rescind the regulation by going through the rulemaking process laid out in federal law, which can take months or longer.
The order was one of several Trump has issued to overhaul the federal government since he took office on Jan. 20. He has also directed agencies to bar most employees from working from home, eliminated diversity programs in federal government, and offered government workers up to eight months of pay and benefits to leave their jobs.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Lee Saunders, AFSCME’s president, in a statement called Trump’s order “a shameless attempt to politicize the federal workforce.”
“Our communities will pay the price if these anti-union extremists are allowed to undo decades of progress by stripping these workers of their freedoms,” Saunders said.
The unions are represented by Democracy Forward, a left-leaning national legal organization that has said it plans to challenge many Trump administration policies.
The group represents advocacy organizations which on Tuesday convinced a judge to block Trump’s sweeping directive to pause federal loans, grants and other financial assistance. The administration rescinded the order on Wednesday.
The unions’ lawsuit is the second to challenge Trump’s order, known as “Schedule Policy/Career.” The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 federal workers, filed a lawsuit last week claiming that Trump failed to justify carving out new exemptions from civil service protections.
Under federal law, the president can exempt positions from the civil service when “necessary” and “as conditions of good administration warrant.”
Wednesday’s lawsuit is narrower and seeks to force OPM to continue enforcing the Biden administration rule until it is repealed.
Trump first carved out the exemption in a 2020 executive order during his first administration, at the time calling it Schedule F. Democratic President Joe Biden rescinded the order in 2021, before any workers were reclassified.
The 2024 rule was intended as a bulwark against Trump’s resurrection of Schedule F. The rule says workers who are involuntarily exempted from the civil service retain the legal protections they had already earned, and created a process for them to challenge their reclassification.
(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York, Editing by Chizu Nomiyama, Alexia Garamfalvi and Bill Berkrot)
