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Washington, D.C.—A federal court granted a request by the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) it hold oral argument on a motion by DHS to narrow the court’s August injunction preventing implementation of key segments of a new personnel system that sharply restricts employee and union rights in the department. The court said it will hear arguments at 2:30 p.m., Wednesday, Sept. 28.

The NTEU request was the latest legal step after a decision by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to enjoin DHS from putting its illegal personnel rules into effect. The union sought oral argument due to the importance of the legal issues at stake.

NTEU steadfastly has argued that the DHS personnel regulations violate congressional intent by going well beyond any personnel authority granted the department in the Homeland Security Act (HSA), which established DHS. In its initial ruling, the court agreed that “significant aspects of the (DHS) HR system fail to conform to the express dictates” of HSA.

While DHS has asked the court to narrow her injunction, NTEU has urged it to maintain the injunction as issued on Aug. 12, arguing that the ruling “invalidated more than a dozen separate regulations that are inextricably intertwined with the rest of the regulations.”

Oral argument would aid the court in addressing a key issue raised by the government’s motion to narrow the scope of the injunction, NTEU said—namely, whether DHS can unilaterally take matters off the bargaining table.

“The parties have diametrically opposing views concerning whether, under this court’s decision, DHS or its managers may lawfully take matters off the bargaining table unilaterally, either by administrative fiat or by asserting a broad management right to take whatever actions are ‘necessary to the department’s mission’,” NTEU said. That issue was not “the central focus of the previous oral argument in this case.”

Other issues include whether the illegal regulations are severable from the regulations as a whole as well as the impact of the statutory DHS-union collaboration requirement in HSA on the government’s authority to implement a modified version of the regulations.

The court invalidated regulations DHS sought to impose that would have allowed the agency to ignore binding collective bargaining agreements, and that would have made it virtually impossible for employees to obtain penalty mitigation from the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB). In addition, the rules sought to illegally commandeer the resources of the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA), an independent federal agency, to review labor-management decisions made by a proposed internal DHS board.

The portions of the regulations struck down as illegal by the court, said NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley at the time, “were clearly key pillars of the DHS scheme." These regulations, Kelley said, “would create an unjust and unfair system that needlessly attacks and undermines the rights of front-line workers.”

NTEU is the largest independent federal employee union representing 150,000 federal employees in 30 federal agencies and departments, including some 14,000 in DHS’s Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP).