The union representing roughly 3,500 National Weather Service employees has asked a federal court to block President Donald Trump’s executive order canceling collective bargaining agreements with forecasters, technicians and support staff at 122 forecast offices around the country.
In a lawsuit filed last week in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the National Weather Service Employees Organization said the Aug. 28 order to nullify labor agreements with NWS employees was not for national security purposes — as the order stated — but in retaliation for the union’s opposition to the Trump administration’s downsizing of already-understaffed weather forecasting offices.
The executive order, which ended collective bargaining rights for employees in six government agencies — NOAA, NASA, the Bureau of Reclamation, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), and the U.S. Agency for Global Media — declared that the affected positions were critical to national security and that negotiations between labor unions and management “can impact the ability of agencies with national security responsibilities to implement policies swiftly and fulfill their critical missions.”
“President Trump is taking action to ensure that agencies vital to national security can execute their missions without delay and protect the American people,” the White House said in a fact sheet about the order. “The President needs a responsive and accountable civil service to protect our national security.”
