A federal court has issued a preliminary injunction that effectively requires federal contracting agencies to continue to require Project Labor Agreements (PLAs) for large-scale construction projects. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia made the ruling May 16 in North America’s Building Trades Unions v. Department of Defense.
In January 2024, the Federal Acquisition Regulatory (FAR) Council implemented President Biden’s Executive Order 14063, essentially mandating union labor for qualifying federal construction projects. However, in February 2025, the Trump Administration’s Department of Defense (DoD) and General Services Administration (GSA) issued “class deviations” to stop mandating PLAs.
In this challenge, the court ruled that federal agencies cannot use internal memos to bypass the E.O.’s PLA mandate. The court emphasized that agencies must follow the E.O. and its regulations until they are lawfully rescinded or overridden. It rejected DoD’s reliance on a different federal court’s ruling that the PLA mandate violated federal procurement law, stating that the earlier case applied only to the contract in question and did not invalidate the E.O. or its regulations.
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