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Washington—The nation’s largest independent union of federal employees today urged the Supreme Court to protect the First Amendment right of public employees at all levels of government to speak out on matters of public concern.

In a friend-of-the-court brief dealing with a California case, Garcetti v. Ceballos, the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) argued that public employees must maintain their right to speak out on work-related matters that affect the public, even when the speech is required by their jobs.

Failing to maintain this protection, said NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley, would dangerously inhibit the ability of federal employees, and all public employees, to protect the public interest by speaking out on policy questions as well as matters of possible wrongdoing.

“NTEU has a long history of acting to protect the First Amendment rights of federal workers,” Kelley said, noting that the experience and knowledge of federal employees play a vital role in our country’s public debate over the course and actions taken by the federal government.

The case at hand arose when an assistant district attorney in Los Angeles wrote a memo to his superiors outlining his concerns about the validity of a search warrant. When he declined to minimize his concerns by rewriting the memo, the employee suffered workplace retaliation. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in the employee’s favor, but the district attorney’s office appealed that decision to the Supreme Court.

The NTEU brief argues that speech by public employees on work-related matters—addressing current government policies or activities of their own departments or agencies—is “speech on classic matters of public concern,” long protected by the Supreme Court.

NTEU points out that the position advanced by the district attorney’s office, “would categorically deny constitutional protection to much of this speech, despite its importance to the public’s understanding of its government, whenever that speech can be characterized as ‘in furtherance of the employee’s job duties.’”

That is the wrong road to take, said NTEU, noting that the Supreme Court has long recognized that “informed debate” on these types of matters requires the input of public employees. “In fact,” the NTEU brief argues, “the closer the relationship between employees’ speech and their work duties, the better equipped employees are to contribute to the public and the government.”

The very purpose of creating informed debate, NTEU told the high court, “is ill-served by offering no First Amendment protection to the very speakers who can contribute the most.”

Earlier this summer, NTEU pressed a First Amendment case against the federal government for the refusal by the General Services Administration to issue a permit for a rally of NTEU members in New York City because they planned to protest a variety of administration and Internal Revenue Service policies. A settlement was reached, at the urging of a federal judge, under which the rally was held and the government agreed to consider fairly other rally requests on their own merit.

As the largest independent federal union, NTEU represents some 150,000 employees in 30 agencies and departments.