Appeals court seemingly OKs VA’s contested union contract expiration

A federal appeals court has seemingly cleared the way for the Veterans Affairs Department to allow its contract with the American Federation of Government Employees to expire.

Last month, a federal judge for the third time blocked VA management from cancelling its collective bargaining agreements with AFGE, the latest in the long-running dispute over the department’s implementation of President Trump’s executive order barring unions across much of the federal government.

U.S. District Judge Melissa DuBose had previously ruled that the VA likely violated union members’ First Amendment rights when it first sought to terminate the contract in August 2025. A three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld most of her injunction and subsequent order enforcing it, though it noted that the court could not force the VA to “comply” with particular contract terms.

In July, the VA announced its intention to end its contracts with AFGE for a third time. This time, the department said it would simply allow the agreements to lapse when they expire in August; the union countered that management had already broached negotiations on a new deal, triggering a clause within the contract automatically extending its expiration date until such time as a successor agreement can be reached.

Dubose again blocked the effort through a new enforcement order last August, but the department appealed that decision again to the First Circuit. In an order Friday, the same three-judge panel that upheld her prior rulings issued a stay halting the most recent order, finding that it modified Dubose’s prior injunction, which is improper when those orders remain under appeal.

“On this score, the defendants contend that the second enforcement order ‘reaches well beyond the original injunction’s scope by imposing on the parties, on pain of contempt, the district court’s resolution of a disputed contract-interpretation question,’ namely, whether the parties’ communications ‘automatically extended the CBA,’” the judges wrote. “That dispute, the defendants assert, is ‘distinct from’ the dispute the district court addressed in the preliminary injunction: whether the defendants’ ‘initial CBA termination was unlawful.’ We agree.”

The three-judge panel found that Dubose’s determination that VA management had triggered the CBA’s automatic extension clause was the type of compliance question they previously warned about when upholding the bulk of her first enforcement order.

“We recognize that there remains an unresolved dispute between the parties as to whether their communications satisfied the CBA’s automatic extension provision,” they wrote. “But that is a function of the fact that the preliminary injunction’s directive to ‘reinstate’ the CBA leaves open potential questions of interpretation of and compliance with the CBA. As we observed in our prior decision, the duty to reinstate the CBA as a binding agreement and a duty not to violate the reinstated CBA in any particular instance are distinct obligations, because  an individual breach would not in and of itself suffice to show that the CBA had not been reinstated as a binding agreement.”