The Supreme Court on Tuesday gave Donald Trump to proceed with an executive order mandating the mass firing of federal employees.
However, one justice objected in the strongest terms. In a scathing 15-page dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called Trump’s order a “wrecking ball” and condemned her colleagues for allowing it to move forward.
“In my view, this decision is not only truly unfortunate,” wrote Jackson, “but also hubristic and senseless.”
In an unsigned order on Tuesday, the Supreme Court lifted a District Court judge’s injunction against the president’s February executive order. The two-paragraph majority opinion argued that the executive order was most likely lawful, making an injunction unnecessary.
Trump’s executive order, which established Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative, called for a “federal transformation of the Federal bureaucracy.” It required government agencies to reduce their numbers substantially, adopting a practice of hiring one employee for every four laid off.
However, the order has been in legal limbo since just two weeks after it was signed, when US District Court Judge Susan Ilston ruled to temporarily block the mass layoffs.
At the time, Judge Ilston ruled that the firings could not proceed until lawsuits filed by labor unions and municipal governments against President Trump and the relevant agencies were resolved.
The Supreme Court took a different stance on Tuesday. However, the justices were careful to stipulate that their decision to lift the injunction shouldn’t be taken as an opinion on the executive order itself. Instead, the order says they “express no view” on whether Trump’s order is legal because the affected agencies have not yet released their layoff plans.
Unlike most court decisions this session, the ruling did not fall along ideological lines. Instead, liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor joined the court’s six conservative justices, ruling in favor of lifting the injunction.
In a concurring opinion, Sotomayor wrote that she had sided with her conservative colleagues because she does not yet have a reason to believe the mass layoffs will violate federal law. A third liberal justice, Elena Kagan, did not write an independent opinion.
However, Jackson warned in her dissent that, unlike past presidents, Trump was seeking to restructure federal agencies without consulting Congress, and warned that “Many serious harms [will] result from allowing the President to dramatically reconfigure the Federal Government.”
Jackson also condemned her colleagues for justifying their ruling under the logic that Trump’s restructuring push had not yet broken the law, without issuing an opinion about the order’s actual legality.
“It is hard to imagine deciding that question in any meaningful way after those changes have happened,” wrote Jackson. “Yet, for some reason, this Court sees fit to step in now and release the President’s wrecking ball at the outset of this litigation.”
The Court’s decision comes less than two weeks after its landmark ruling to restrict lower court judges from issuing nationwide injunctions blocking presidential orders. That ruling opened the door for President Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship to take effect. However, all three liberal justices dissented from that ruling.
At the time, Justice Sotomayor wrote a withering dissent, co-signed by Jackson and Kagan, in which she said of the ruling, “This Court endorses the radical proposition that the President is harmed, irreparably, whenever he cannot do something he wants to do, even if what he wants to do is break the law.”
In her own separate dissent, Justice Jackson wrote, “This Court’s complicity in the creation of a culture of disdain for lower courts, their rulings, and the law (as they interpret it) will surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions, enabling our collective demise.”
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