Multiple courts have blocked the Office of Personnel Management’s attempt to terminate union contracts for thousands of federal employees—but hey, what if OPM just did it anyway?
That’s exactly what they are doing. According to OPM, because President Donald Trump issued an executive order demanding union-busting, every agency must follow those orders—and not court orders—and terminate collective bargaining agreements.
It should go without saying that executive orders do not have the force of law, while court orders do, but in the current administration, whatever Trump vomits onto the page outweighs everything else.
So, rather than complying with court orders, the administration instead sent a memo this past Thursday to all agencies telling them to get on board with terminating union contracts ASAP. But what about those court orders? The OPM memo just vibes right past that:
For various reasons, including litigation, implementation of these Executive Orders at certain agencies and agency subdivisions has been delayed. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) now advises agencies and agency subdivisions covered by E.O. 14251 and E.O. 14343 that they should proceed to terminate or modify Collective Bargaining Agreements (CBAs) in order to fully comply with those Executive Orders.
The 1978 Civil Service Reform Act exempts certain workers at agencies where the “primary function” is national security, so Trump’s executive order basically declared that nearly all agencies somehow have a national security function and therefore can’t have unions. Fun fact: Agencies with no discernible national security function, like the Food and Drug Administration, are subject to this union-busting, but agencies that actually do involve national security, like the Border Patrol, get to keep their unions. Well, of course, since the Border Patrol union endorsed Trump in 2024.
This is just how the federal government works now. Laws don’t matter. Court orders don’t matter. What matters is the Trump administration getting to harm the people it wants to harm and protect the people it wants to protect.
Despite this, an OPM spokesperson told Government Executive that this is not an instruction to defy federal judges—heavens, no! And yet the spokesperson didn’t explain how terminating union contracts in defiance of court orders is not acting in defiance of court orders, save for the fact that OPM just says it isn’t a problem.
One court—the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals—did stay a lower court’s preliminary injunction blocking the administration from this, but that order didn’t cover all the agencies Trump is targeting.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled similarly but partly on the grounds that the unions lacked standing to sue because the administration pinky-sweared it would not end any collective bargaining while the case was pending. Needless to say, the case is still pending.
By now, this sort of thing feels distressingly routine. The administration’s open defiance of court orders began in March 2025, when it ignored Judge James Boasberg’s order to turn around planes bound for a brutal Salvadoran prison.
Since then, the administration has gotten exceedingly comfy ignoring court orders when it comes to illegally detaining people scooped up in Trump’s brutal, murderous war on immigrants. Since October, judges have ruled over 4,400 times that the administration is illegally detaining immigrants, but it just keeps doing it.
In fact, federal agents allegedly don’t even monitor the email address used by attorneys to send release orders, with one laughing while admitting that, according to a lawsuit. Rather than comply with those release orders, ICE allegedly transfers deportees out of state instead.
So why not ignore court orders about unions? Who is going to stop them? Not the lower courts, obviously, and certainly not Congress.
Regularly ignoring court orders is a five-alarm fire, a startling attack on American democracy, but the Supreme Court and Congress have abandoned their duties to check and balance the monster that is Trump, even as lower courts struggle mightily to do just that. Those judges are attempting to preserve the rule of law in the face of a continuously lawless administration, but they really can’t go it alone.
