The State - News from May 27, 1988

A federal judge in San Francisco extended until June 16 his order prohibiting the Reagan Administration from conducting random drug tests of the 13,000 federal prison employees. U.S. District Judge Stanley Weigel took the action in a suit by the American Federation of Government Employees, the nation’s largest federal workers’ union, before starting a hearing on whether to continue the ban until trial. The program stems from President Reagan’s September, 1986, executive order imposing drug testing on federal employees in “sensitive” jobs. The Bureau of Prisons is one of the first agencies scheduled to implement testing, and the first to order random testing applied to all its employees, on the theory that all hold sensitive jobs. The testing was to have started May 23, but Weigel delayed it, saying constitutional problems were raised by the testing of “law-abiding employees” who were not suspected of wrongdoing.