VA: Court order requires we reinstate union contract, not honor its terms

The Veterans Affairs Department told a federal judge Tuesday that while a court order earlier this month required the department to restore its union contract with the American Federation of Government Employees, the ruling does not require them to actually follow any of its terms.

Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Melissa DuBose found that VA Secretary Doug Collins violated the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedures Act last year when he terminated the department’s collective bargaining agreements with AFGE in connection with President Trump’s executive order banning unions from most agencies under the auspices of national security.

But last week, AFGE reported that while the VA issued a memo stating that it had “reinstated” the union contract, that was all the department did. As part of a motion requesting that the judge enforce her preliminary injunction, the union said agency officials continued to deny employees union representation during disciplinary proceedings and even CBA-mandated paid parental leave.

“Although defendants assert that the master agreement has been ‘reinstated,’ they are failing to comply with easy-to-understand and easy-to-implement provisions of the master agreement,” the union wrote. “The reality is, for the hundreds of thousands of VA employees represented by plaintiffs, absolutely nothing has changed since the issuance of the PI order.”

The VA, for its part, requested the judge clarify her order, claiming it could be understood to bar terminating AFGE’s union contracts for the duration of the contract, which expires later this year. This led to a seemingly exasperated response from DuBose.

 “The additional plain language [in the injunction] simply acknowledges that the master CBA has an agreed-upon term and may have ‘amendments, local supplemental agreements and memoranda of understand’ related thereto using the terms employed by plaintiffs in their motion and not questioned by the defendants in their response in opposition,” she wrote. “The court is at a loss to understand how that conclusion and the resulting injunction could possibly be read to order that (1) the defendants are wholesale prohibited from terminating the master CBA again prior to the end of the three-year term governing the contract or (2) the defendants must reinstate any contract that is not encompassed by the master CBA and agreements related thereto as identified above.”

And in a new filing Tuesday, the VA spelled out its position: the court order merely requires the reinstatement of AFGE’s union contracts, not that the department abide by those contracts’ provisions.

“Plaintiffs’ motion conflates reinstating the master CBA with adhering to each and every one of its terms in existence before issuance of the presidential executive order,” the department wrote. “In other words, plaintiffs argue that if the VA is not adhering to every term of the master CBA as plaintiffs understand it, the VA is not merely in breach of the CBA but also in violation of the preliminary injunction. That is mistaken. The existence of a contract does not guarantee that both parties will adhere to each and every contract term indefinitely.”

Instead of seeking enforcement of the injunction from U.S. District Court, the VA said that AFGE must make use of the contract provisions governing breach of the contract’s provisions, namely arbitrated grievances.

“If plaintiffs have a good-faith basis for contending that the VA has breached a provision of the master CBA (for example by not providing a covered employee with the proper amount of maternity leave), plaintiffs’ remedy is to file a complaint under the grievance procedures set out in the master CBA, rather than filing a motion to enforce with the court.”

But as AFGE stated in its own brief, the VA still is refusing to participate in those grievance procedures.

“On March 16, 2026, the arbitrator handling the AFGE Local 85 grievance requested that the parties move forward with rescheduling proceedings, citing the PI order,” the union wrote. “On March 19, defendants sent a letter arguing that the PI order lacks clarity and the arbitration ‘should continue to be held in abeyance and processing should only be resumed once the controlling litigation concludes.’ Defendants have relied on similar language in refusing to engage in other arbitrations.”