NTEU sues IRS over destruction of employees’ pro-union decorations

The National Treasury Employees Union on Monday sued the Internal Revenue Service, alleging that the agency has begun confiscating and disposing of pro-NTEU flyers and other decorations from employees’ communal and personal workspaces in violation of their First Amendment rights.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C., documents multiple occasions in which IRS Facilities Management and Security Services personnel stole NTEU paraphernalia from workers’ cubicles, and it reports widespread efforts to literally paper over communal bulletin boards where the union’s flyers are often posted.

“The two FMSS employees walked from cubicle to cubicle to relay this message to even those employees who were not displaying NTEU materials at all to deter them from putting up such materials in the future,” the lawsuit states, describing an incident at an IRS office in Decatur, Ga. “And both FMSS employees came to [local NTEU chapter President Lakisha] Murphy’s cubicle to instruct her to remove her NTEU materials; otherwise, they said, they would remove those materials at the end of the workday. That is what happened: FMSS removed NTEU flags from three cubicles and disposed of them in the men’s restroom. One flag was returned upon Ms. Murphy’s request, but the others could not be retrieved from the restroom waste.”

The incidents stem from a May 29 directive from IRS’ acting chief of FMSS John Pekarik instructing employees to remove “any and all NTEU materials” in IRS facilities using “whatever steps are necessary,” short of vandalism of non-union property to reach the offending decoration. The email suggested the initiative was aimed at complying with President Trump’s 2025 executive order stripping two-thirds of the federal workforce, including IRS employees, of their collective bargaining rights on national security grounds.

“IRS leadership has identified instances of NTEU flyers, posters and other paraphernalia remaining in place at IRS posts of duty,” the email stated. “Given the high-profile nature of these materials as they relate to the president’s executive order, and given IRS senior leadership’s prior directive to ensure all of these materials have been removed, I’ve been asked to ensure that recurring instances of NTEU materials in the workplace be addressed immediately.”

Neither Trump’s union executive orders nor the Office of Personnel Management’s implementing guidance make mention of scrubbing workspaces of references to the union or barring employees from displaying their support for the labor groups.

NTEU says the forward-looking prohibition on employees posting NTEU-related materials in the workplace is a classic example of prior restraint, a form of government censorship that federal courts find unconstitutional in most cases.

“In cases involving a broad ban on group speech, ‘the government must show that the interests of both potential audiences and a vast group of present and future employees in a broad range of present and future expression are outweighed by that expressions’ necessary impact on the actual operation of the government,” the union wrote. “This is an exacting standard. Here, NTEU materials remaining in common space and employee workstations at IRS facilities have no ‘impact on the actual operations of the government.’ Indeed, those types of signs and posters have been in IRS workplaces for decades.”

The lawsuit accuses IRS of what NTEU National President Doreen Greenwald called “textbook” viewpoint discrimination against union supporters at the agency, as well as violations of the First Amendment’s freedom of association.

“NTEU will not stand for the administration’s effort to retaliate against us for our advocacy and to try to erase NTEU from the workplace,” she said. “NTEU has represented IRS employees for nearly a century. It will continue to fight for their right to speak up and support the union.”