A future Republican administration is expected to restore a comparable set of orders. Image: Sergii Gnatiuk/Shutterstock.com
In a decision that has no immediate practical impact but involves an issue that may be revisited in the future, the FLRA has dismissed as moot a case seeking to define agency responsibilities to bargain over changes to federal personnel policies of the sort the Trump administration ordered.
The case involved a trio of mid-2018 executive orders that among other things to restrict the scope of bargaining and the types of topics over which unions could invoke grievance procedures, compel negotiations to move faster, instruct agencies to act promptly to declare impasses, limit the amount of official time to which agencies would agree, and more. The orders soon were suspended by a federal district court ruling, which an appeals court overturned in late 2019 on grounds that challenges had to first go through the internal government channels.
In one such challenge, brought by the AFGE union against the Defense Logistics Agency, an arbitrator found in mid-2020 that agencies were not required to bargain over the substance of the orders although they were required to bargain over “procedures and appropriate arrangements” for carrying out their terms. Both sides then appealed to the full FLRA but in early 2021 the Biden administration took office and quickly revoked the three orders.
The FLRA said that in light of that action, the case should be dismissed because “the parties no longer have a legally cognizable interest in the dispute.” The arbitrator had found that the agency had not actually carried out any of the policies of the orders so there is no relief to be granted to the union, it said.
While the ruling ends the challenge to those orders, it’s generally expected that a future Republican administration would issue a comparable set of orders and that federal unions would bring similar challenges.
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