A federal judge has reinstated a member of a board that hears disputes between federal labor unions and the government, sharply condemning President Donald Trump’s attempt to fire her in a late-night email last month.
The order reinstates Susan Grundmann as a member of the Federal Labor Management Authority, a panel that is becoming increasingly important as Trump’s administration attempts to thwart federal workers’ labor unions and lay off massive numbers of employees.
The Department of Homeland Security announced Friday it would end collective bargaining for the agency that handles airport security, and Trump on his first day in office said his administration would not abide by the Department of Education’s union contract.
“According to the Government, any order from this Court that results in the officer continuing her role against the President’s will would raise grave separation-of-powers concerns,” wrote U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a Biden appointee. “It is the Government’s own argument that raises grave separation-of-powers concerns.”
Grundmann is one of several people leading federal labor agencies whom Trump attempted to fire via late-night emails. A court temporarily reinstated another, Cathy Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board, which protects federal employees from firings that are illegal or unrelated to their performance.
A court last week reinstated Gwynne Wilcox to the National Labor Relations Board, which largely deals with private sector unions and employees’ attempts to form them, in another blistering opinion that questioned the Trump administration’s interpretation of executive power.
Trump has so far only been successful in firing Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger, who attempted to block the February firings of thousands of probationary employees. But Dellinger’s legal case was different because he was a single executive and not a board member.
Sooknanan referenced all four of those firings in her decision before slamming the Department of Justice, which said “the president cannot be compelled to retain the services of a principal officer whom he no longer believes should be entrusted with executive power.”
The department said the law protecting Grundmann was unconstitutional, a position centered on the idea that executive power lies solely with the president of the United States and that Trump should be able to fire at will the heads of executive branch agencies Congress intended to be independent.
“The Government’s arguments paint with a broad brush and threaten to upend fundamental protections in our Constitution,” Sooknanan wrote. “But ours is not an autocracy; it is a system of checks and balances. Our Founders recognized that the concentration of power in one branch of government would spell disaster.”
