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Washington, D.C.—In a major victory for all federal workers, a federal judge tonight ruled in a suit brought by the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) that key personnel regulations sought to be implemented by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are illegal and cannot be put in place. This decision effectively stops DHS from implementing its new labor relations system on Monday, as it had planned.

NTEU argued that the regulations, issued jointly by DHS and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), manufactured a system that failed to ensure employees’ right to bargain collectively, as required by the Homeland Security Act (HSA). The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia agreed and struck the regulations down as illegal, concluding that “significant aspects of the HR System fail to conform to the express dictates of the Homeland Security Act.”

NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley called the decision by Judge Rosemary Collyer “an enormous and critically-important win for the rights of federal employees not only in DHS but in all federal agencies.”

This legal victory, she said, “will reverberate through the entire federal employee community” inasmuch as the administration has proposed extending the DHS personnel model along with new rules it is attempting to implement in the Department of Defense (DoD) to every federal agency.

President Kelley said the judge’s decision “vindicates completely” NTEU’s arguments that DHS and OPM far overstepped the bounds of authority given to them by Congress in the HSA, which established DHS.

“There was never any reason for the Department of Homeland Security to so severely restrict the rights of the very employees who are on the front-lines of the war against terrorism—a war whose goal is to protect and preserve rights enjoyed by all Americans,” Kelley said.

With respect to collective bargaining, Judge Collyer wrote in her decision that “collective bargaining has at least one irreducible minimum that is missing from the HR System; a binding contract.” The court was troubled that the regulations provided the Department with a huge loophole through which it could void any provision in a collective bargaining agreement and that management sought to reserve to itself the authority to implement unilaterally its position on every condition of employment. Essentially, all the Department needed to do was issue an agency-wide directive that could invalidate provisions of a negotiated agreement and clear the way for it to implement unilaterally its position. The judge said that under this arrangement “collective bargaining agreements would no longer be legally binding on the Secretary or enforceable by the Unions if management exercised its unreviewable discretion to declare some aspect of a contract inimical to the Department’s mission.”

In addition to ruling in NTEU’s favor on its collective bargaining argument, Judge Collyer also upheld its challenge to DHS’s efforts to dictate the role of the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) in the system. She held that DHS lacked authority to direct the operations of an independent agency. Similarly, the court struck down as "unfair" the regulation severely limiting penalty mitigation standards that apply to DHS employees. Judge Collyer's injunction also bars these regulations from taking effect, sending DHS and OPM back to the drawing board.

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 employees in 30 agencies and departments, including more than 14,000 in DHS.