The Supreme Court on Tuesday lifted a judge’s order preventing the Trump administration from conducting mass layoffs across the federal bureaucracy, for now.
The court in its unsigned ruling said Trump’s February executive order directing federal agencies to prepare for reductions in force, or RIFs, is likely lawful.
It enables federal agencies to resume implementing Trump’s directive, though the high court left the door open for plaintiffs to challenge any agency’s specific plan down the road.
“We express no view on the legality of any Agency RIF and Reorganization Plan produced or approved pursuant to the Executive Order and Memorandum,” the court’s ruling cautions.
But for now, it marks a major victory for the administration, which has brought a flurry of emergency appeals to the Supreme Court seeking to halt lower judges’ injunctions.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, calling the court’s decision “hubristic and senseless.” She criticized her colleagues for second-guessing the lower judge from the court’s “lofty perch far from the facts or the evidence.”
“In my view, this was the wrong decision at the wrong moment, especially given what little this Court knows about what is actually happening on the ground,” Jackson wrote.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, another of the court’s Democratic-appointed justices who often dissents alongside Jackson, said she agreed with some of her concerns. But Sotomayor sided with the administration at this stage of the case.
“The plans themselves are not before this Court, at this stage, and we thus have no occasion to consider whether they can and will be carried out consistent with the constraints of law. I join the Court’s stay because it leaves the District Court free to consider those questions in the first instance,” Sotomayor wrote.
The order lifts an injunction issued by San Francisco-based U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, an appointee of former President Clinton, on May 22 that indefinitely halted efforts to conduct RIFs at more than a dozen federal departments and agencies. She did so by finding Trump’s executive order was likely unlawful and required congressional authority.
“Agencies are being prevented (and have been since the district court issued its temporary restraining order a month ago) from taking needed steps to make the federal government and workforce more efficient,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote to the Supreme Court.
“Absent intervention from this Court, that intolerable state of affairs promises to endure for months.”
The judge’s injunction came in response to a lawsuit brought by labor unions, advocacy groups and local governments.
They urged the Supreme Court to keep the judge’s ruling in place, warning the president will otherwise implement a “breakneck reorganization” of the federal government before the merits of the case are settled.
“There will be no way to unscramble that egg: If the courts ultimately deem the President to have overstepped his authority and intruded upon that of Congress, as a practical matter there will be no way to go back in time to restore those agencies, functions, and services,” their attorneys wrote in court filings.
The plaintiffs are represented by law firm Altshuler Berzon and several legal groups that regularly file legal challenges to the president’s policies: Democracy Forward, Protect Democracy, State Democracy Defenders Fund and the Public Rights Project.
The decision marks the second time the Supreme Court has intervened on an emergency basis to allow the Trump administration to terminate masses of federal employees.
In April, the court allowed the administration to fire thousands of probationary employees over the dissents of two of the court’s liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
The Justice Department had urged the Supreme Court to intervene in the RIFs case at an earlier stage, too, to lift a previous, temporary injunction. But the court declined to do so by running out the clock until that injunction expired, making the case moot.
