By Nate Raymond
BOSTON, June 29 (Reuters) – A federal judge on Monday blocked the U.S. agency that oversees union elections for federal employees from shifting authority over all labor representation decisions to its top body, which is dominated by Republicans appointed by President Donald Trump.
Chief U.S. District Judge Denise Casper in Boston sided with eight unions who had sued to prevent the Federal Labor Relations Authority from stripping its regional directors of their decades-old power to decide cases themselves by having its three-member body of presidential appointees handle all of them.
Casper, who was appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama, said FLRA’s action is arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act as the agency failed to provide an adequate explanation for why it was revoking a system that since 1983 it had deemed necessary to increase efficiency.
She said shifting to a system in which the FLRA’s three-member body must reach a collective decision on all matters “will increase not just the Authority’s caseload, but the processing and adjudication times for representation matters as well.”
The FLRA did not respond to a request for comment.
Unions including the AFL-CIO and the American Federation of Government Employees sued in April after the agency announced a new policy that would alter a system that has been in place under a rule adopted during Republican President Ronald Reagan’s tenure in 1983.
Under that rule, the three-member body has delegated to career, nonpartisan directors of five regional offices the ability to determine when proposed bargaining units are appropriate, order and supervise elections, and certify the results.
A small fraction of election results — just six out of 277 cases in 2025 — are challenged in appeals decided by the three-member panel.
The FLRA today has a 2-1 majority of Republicans appointed by Trump. It said the old system resulted in duplicative filings and was time consuming and that, going forward, most election petitions would go directly to the panel, which will “work collaboratively” with regional directors.
The unions argued the FLRA violated the Administrative Procedure Act by failing to explain how shifting the 98% of mundane cases the three-member body normally does not hear to those presidential appointees would streamline anything.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; editing by Edward Tobin)
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