RI federal judge issues temporary order restoring VA employee union contracts

A Rhode Island federal judge ruled Friday that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs must restore an agency-wide collective bargaining agreement nullified last year, leaving hundreds of thousands of unionized workers without union safeguards.

U.S. District Judge Melissa DuBose decided that Local 2305, a regional chapter of the national American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), and AFGE National VA Council (NVAC) were unlawfully deprived of their bargaining agreement when VA Secretary Doug Collins canceled it on Aug. 6, 2025. Collins did so to comply with an executive order Trump issued in March 2025.

Local 2305 counts just under 200 workers at the Providence VA Medical Center as members, plus another 250 or so members statewide. The AFGE National VA Council represents roughly 320,000 VA employees nationwide. 

AFGE National President Everett Kelley issued a statement Friday afternoon on DuBose’s granting the injunction.

“When the VA signed its contract with AFGE/NVAC, it made a binding commitment to provide AFGE/NVAC-represented nurses, doctors, and other VA staff with the rights and support they need to care for our veterans,” Kelley said. “That contract cannot be unilaterally torn up. The VA’s actions didn’t just violate the law. Those same actions put veterans’ care at risk by undermining the very people dedicated to serving them.” 

The preliminary ruling does not comprise a final judgment on the merits of the case, which was brought to the court in November and went before DuBose late last month. 

VA employee unions ask Providence federal judge to reinstate contract

Still, Kelley saw the temporary order as a validation of the union’s arguments against those of the Trump administration, which claimed the contract was terminated as part of a wider federal initiative to purge select union agreements from national governance for security reasons. 

“Secretary Collins singled out AFGE and our members for retaliation because we refused to stay silent about cuts and changes at the VA that would harm veterans,” Kelley wrote. 

What made “retaliation impossible to deny,” Kelley wrote, was that the VA exempted other unions from the national security clause even though they should have fallen under the same requirements as AFGE. 

DuBose largely agreed with that sentiment in her ruling, writing that “the termination of the Master CBA on August 6 seems substantially motivated by the Plaintiffs’ history and frequency of vocally opposing changes to labor policies.” DuBose cited press releases and an internal VA memo regarding the Aug. 6 contract cancellation, neither of which cited national security. 

Instead, DuBose wrote, these announcements focused on the “cost to the VA of its employees’ union-representation as well as the difficulty the VA has had rewarding high performing employees and holding poorly performing employees accountable.” The feds’ only citation of national security came from a declaration filed Dec. 19, 2025, by Tracey Therit, the VA department’s chief human capital officer for human resources and administration. 

Therit wrote that, in 1982, the VA was assigned a new “primary mission: to improve the nation’s preparedness for national emergencies, including war, terrorism, and natural disasters,” which formed part of the rationale for the national security label applied to it under Trump’s executive order. 

DuBose was unconvinced. “Other than the one, vague, post hoc statement about national security that appears in Therit’s declaration, there is zero indication from the Defendants that the termination decision would have been made or implemented without the retaliatory motive,” the judge wrote, adding that official statements of the termination only further weighed the “injunctive relief calculus” in the plaintiffs’ favor, DuBose wrote. 

Judge avoids constitutional question

DuBose left untouched, however, the constitutionality of Trump’s executive order.

“From the outset, the Court wants to be clear that it is deeply mindful of the lane it is in and will stay in,” DuBose wrote in her introduction to the plaintiffs’ merits. “This case is not about the constitutionality of the EO.”

DuBose instead narrowed her focus to the VA’s actions and whether the collective bargaining agreement’s termination was unlawful because, as the plaintiffs argued, it violated their First Amendment rights as well as the Administrative Procedure Act, which outlines how federal agencies make and explain their decisions.

Typically, an agency’s actions are deemed “arbitrary and capricious” if they do not follow procedures or are ill-explained to the beneficiaries they directly affect.

DuBose found that “terminating the Plaintiffs’ contract but not that of other unions at the same time…convinces this Court that the agency action was neither reasonable nor reasonably explained.”

DuBose was also unswayed by the federal government’s arguments that, because Trump’s EO was being separately litigated in San Francisco’s U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the AFGE’s Rhode Island suit should be dismissed. The unions countered that the Rhode Island court was litigating the contract termination, not Trump’s executive order itself.

“The Plaintiffs have the better argument,” DuBose wrote. “The challenged actions in each case, though ultimately executed by the Federal Government, were undertaken by different individuals and entities within the Government. Secretary Collins had no role in the issuance of the EO, and the Plaintiffs’ claims only pertain to Secretary Collins’ and the VA’s actions.”

The VA did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.

The Ninth Circuit ultimately lifted the Northern California District Court’s injunction against Trump’s executive order on Feb. 26, a decision which AFGE president Kelley nevertheless interpreted as a “precedent-setting victory” in a statement released that day.

“The administration argued that unions should be forced into an administrative process that no longer applies after workers are excluded from the statute,” Kelley wrote. “The court rejected that argument and confirmed that the federal courts are the proper forum to decide this dispute.”

DuBose was sympathetic to the federal argument that “reversing these changes will have associated costs of time and resources for the VA,” she wrote, citing Therit’s declaration. The VA official wrote that an injunction would eat up the VA’s time and resources as the agency would have to reinstate space for union reps, work with payroll providers to begin collecting dues again, and other to-do lists. 

“But the significant injury to the Plaintiffs from the loss of status as representatives of many VA employees and to their members from the revocation of the protections and benefits of the Master CBA weighs more heavily at this juncture,” DuBose wrote.

Unlike most trade unions, federal unions can’t strike or set wages with their employer, but they can seek to redress pay or other work-related grievances. The cancellation of the collective bargaining agreement evaporated these protections, which the AFGE unions said led to a loss of membership. One court document included an email from a member who said they were ending their membership “due to the fact that I am not being represented by the union anymore.”

DuBose cited other union documentation of the contract termination’s aftermath. Grievance procedures came to a halt, some workers lost the disciplinary protections typically afforded them, union representatives had trouble carrying out their duties, and some new moms and dads saw reduced parental leave benefits.

“Disciplinary processes, once concluded, have an immediate and irreparable effect on the employee(s) in question,” DuBose wrote. “Parents cannot turn back the clock to have more time with an infant prior to returning to work once they have missed the early formative weeks of development and their own recovery time.”