By Daniel Wiessner
March 27 (Reuters) – A federal judge on Friday threatened to hold the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in contempt of court for terminating a union contract covering 320,000 of the agency’s employees shortly after she had ordered that it be reinstated.
U.S. District Judge Melissa DuBose in Providence, Rhode Island, during a hearing said the VA’s abrupt move announced in an after-hours court filing on Thursday was openly defiant of her March 13 ruling and had thrown the case “into chaos.”
The American Federation of Government Employees is challenging the VA’s decision last August to terminate the union contract in light of President Donald Trump’s 2025 executive order stripping roughly 1 million federal workers of collective bargaining rights. DuBose had ordered the VA to temporarily reinstate the contract pending the outcome of the case.
On Thursday night, the agency told DuBose that it had re-terminated the contract without explaining how her ruling allowed it to do so.
“For you to suggest that all of the work that was done prior to the re-termination is kind of mooted out is really a blatant disrespect for not just this court’s order but for the rule of law,” DuBose said to Tyler Becker of the U.S. Department of Justice, who represents the VA.
Becker argued during the hearing that the union could no longer challenge the initial termination of the contract and had to renew its arguments after it was canceled a second time.
Travis Silva, a lawyer for AFGE, said the VA had numerous legitimate options including appealing DuBose’s decision or asking her to reconsider it. “Not this self-help maneuver that they’re trying to do here,” he said.
DuBose granted AFGE’s motion to enforce her earlier ruling reinstating the union contract. In a written order after the hearing, she told the VA to immediately notify employees that the bargaining agreement was in effect “in both form and substance” and ordered the agency to provide status reports on how it was complying with her decision.
The judge, an appointee of Democratic former President Joe Biden, gave the Trump administration until Tuesday to explain why she should not hold the VA in contempt of her earlier decision. She scheduled a hearing on the matter for April 3.
In a separate written decision on Friday, DuBose temporarily blocked the VA from canceling separate bargaining agreements with seven unions that cover about 2,800 of the agency’s employees.
DuBose in her earlier ruling agreed with the union that the VA improperly canceled its bargaining agreement in August as retaliation for the union’s opposition to Trump administration policies. She said the VA had provided no evidence to back up its claim that national security had motivated the decision to cancel the union contract.
Trump’s executive order exempted the VA and more than a dozen other federal agencies from obligations to bargain with unions, citing what he said was their intelligence and national security work. It significantly expanded an existing exception for workers with duties implicating national security, such as federal law enforcement agents.
Trump’s order has been challenged in at least three lawsuits, while unions have filed many more challenges to individual agencies canceling bargaining agreements. Last month, a federal appeals court in San Francisco rejected a bid by AFGE and other unions to block Trump’s order while their case proceeds.
(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Matthew Lewis)
