Judge: TSA 'plainly' violated court order with renewed union busting push
Source: GovExec.com
The Homeland Security Department’s planned ouster of the American Federation of Government Employees from the Transportation Security Administration, scheduled to take effect Sunday, must now be halted.
ERICH WAGNER | JANUARY 15, 2026 05:33 PM ET
UNIONS
HOMELAND SECURITY
This story has been updated at 6:30 p.m. ET.
A federal judge in Seattle on Thursday put a halt to the Trump administration’s renewed effort to strip Transportation Security Administration workers of their collective bargaining rights, finding that a gambit to replace a policy document undergirding the initiative with a more detailed one “plainly” violated a 2025 court order.
When TSA was established following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the agency was granted broad discretion to administer its personnel system. But following years of poor morale and high attrition rates, the agency granted the workforce abridged collective bargaining rights in 2011 and expanded those rights in 2022 and issued a new pay scale akin to the federal government’s General Schedule.
Last March, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem issued a determination seeking to unwind TSA workers’ collective bargaining rights, but U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman found that decision to be retaliatory against the American Federation of Government Employees, particularly due to the “threadbare justification” in Noem’s memo, and issued a preliminary injunction blocking its implementation.
But last month, TSA unveiled that Noem had issued a new determination last September that included new details in its justification for excising unions at the agency, particularly the purported costs of collective bargaining, though those costs amounted to a sliver of the agency’s budget.
In an order Thursday, U.S. District Judge Jamal Whitehead, a Biden appointee who took over the case last October, scolded the administration for its attempted end-run around the original injunction.
Read more: https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2026/01/judge-tsa-plainly-violated-court-order-renewed-union-busting-push/410739/?oref=ge-home-top-story
They are trying to destroy all federal employee Unions, but employee Unions are fighting back.