Reading the Record, Part Five: The Record and the Case: What a Court Will Weigh

This series has worked through the evidence the government assembled to justify ending collective bargaining for the nation's Transportation Security Officers.

This final part connects what that record shows to the case now before the court, and does so carefully, because the distinction between what the evidence suggests and what a court has decided is one this series has tried to hold throughout.

Nothing here is a prediction. The court has not ruled on the merits. The preliminary injunction protecting the 2024 agreement remains in effect while the litigation proceeds, and the administrative record examined in this series was itself filed only in September 2026, which means the merits briefing that will interpret it has not yet occurred. What follows is not a forecast of the outcome. It is an account of how the contents of the record line up with the legal questions the court will actually decide.

The Standard

The governing standard is the one the Administrative Procedure Act supplies. A court reviewing an agency action asks whether the action was arbitrary and capricious. An agency decision fails that test, in the language the Supreme Court has used, when the agency relied on factors it was not meant to consider, failed to consider an important aspect of the problem, or offered an explanation that runs counter to the evidence before it.

The last of those is the one this record raises most directly. The question is not whether ending collective bargaining is wise policy. The question is whether the agency's stated reasons hold up against the agency's own evidence.

The Absence Claim

On the central empirical claim, the record and the determination diverge. The determination attributes rising absences to the agreement's three-day self-certification provision. The record shows that provision is longstanding agency policy, present in TSA's own directive since 2011 and carried forward unchanged through both the prior collective bargaining agreement and the 2024 one.

And on the numbers themselves, the determination's own absence data shows the movement it describes tracks the seasonal calendar, with December peaks and spring troughs far larger than any difference tied to the agreement's presence or absence, and shows that at several major airports absences fell after the agreement was restored.

An explanation that attributes an effect to a contract provision, when the agency's own data shows the provision predates the contract and the effect follows the season, is the kind of explanation the arbitrary-and-capricious standard is designed to test.

The Survey

On the agency's treatment of its own survey, the record raises a related question. An agency must consider the important aspects of the problem before it, including evidence that cuts against its conclusion.

The survey of Federal Security Directors returned a mixed picture: managers identified real friction with the agreement, and they also identified concrete strengths, including protections some of them said have no counterpart in agency policy. The determination characterized those strengths as unsubstantiated, not the product of bargaining, or too minor to matter.

When an agency's stated rationale describes a mixed record as a one-sided one, a reviewing court may ask whether the agency genuinely grappled with the evidence it had.

The Timing

There is also the matter of timing, which bears on a different claim. The supplemental complaint alleges that the determination was retaliation for the union's protected activity in the courts, and that the stated operational reasons are pretext.

The record contains a fact relevant to that allegation. The determination is dated September 25, 2025, and stated it was effective immediately, yet the agency did not disclose it to the workforce or the union until December 12, 2025, more than two months later. A decision described as an urgent response to a security-threatening operational problem, held quietly for more than two months before anyone affected was told, is a sequence a court weighing a pretext claim is entitled to consider.

What This Does Not Decide

The government will offer its own reading of the record, and the deference courts extend to agencies on matters touching national security is real and will be part of the analysis. A court may find the determination survives review despite the tensions this series has identified.

What we can say is narrower and more durable. The evidence the agency assembled is now public. On the central factual claim, that evidence does not straightforwardly support the conclusion the agency drew from it. That is not a prediction about who wins. It is an observation any reader can confirm against the record, which was the purpose of this series.

What the Record Asks

The larger point is the one we began with. For more than a year, this decision was defended through characterizations, and the material behind them was not available to the people most affected by it. It is available now. The officers whose representation is at stake can read the same nine-page determination the Secretary signed, the same absence tables, the same survey responses, and the same cost calculations, and reach their own judgment about whether the case for ending their collective bargaining rights is as strong as it has been said to be.

Institutions ask to be trusted. A public record asks only to be read. We would rather hand the workforce the record.

Read It Yourself

The full administrative record is on the public docket in American Federation of Government Employees v. Mullin, Case No. 2:25-cv-00451, United States District Court for the Western District of Washington, filed September 4, 2026, as Document 90. The litigation continues.

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