By Nate Raymond

BOSTON, May 21 (Reuters) - A federal judge on Thursday appeared skeptical of a plan by the U.S. agency that oversees union elections for federal employees to shift authority over all labor representation decisions to three presidentially-appointed board members and strip regional directors of their decades-old power to decide cases themselves.

Chief U.S. District Judge Denise Casper during a hearing in Boston questioned how the Federal Labor Relations Authority could possibly accomplish its stated goal of streamlining the process by having the three-member panel of political appointees hear all cases and not just the 2% that generate appeals.

"You're taking a caseload that's spread out throughout regional directors and putting it on the plate of a three-person national body," Casper, who was appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama, told a lawyer for the FLRA. "I guess I'm not understanding how that streamlines things."

Casper heard arguments in a lawsuit filed by eight unions including the AFL-CIO, the largest U.S. labor federation, and the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 800,000 federal employees.

They sued last month 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 President Donald 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.

FLRA Solicitor Thomas Tso said the agency had acted lawfully in deciding to revisit its earlier decision to delegate authority to the regional directors.

"All we're doing is internal housekeeping," he said at the hearing. "But we're saying that instead of the agents doing the initial decisionmaking, the authority's going to do it themselves."

Leon Dayan, a lawyer for the unions at Bredhoff & Kaiser, argued the new policy was arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act, as the FLRA had not explained how shifting the 98% of "mundane" cases it does not normally hear to the three-member body would streamline anything.

"Just intuitively, it's going to be a drag on the body," he said.

The case is American Federation of Government Employees v. U.S. Federal Labor Relations Authority, U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, No. 1:26-cv-11747.

For the unions: Leon Dayan of Bredhoff & Kaiser

For the FLRA: FLRA Solicitor Thomas Tso

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