A federal judge on Wednesday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from conducting mass federal layoffs during the government shutdown, siding with unions that have argued that the firings were illegal.
The decision delivered an early legal blow to President Trump, who has sought to use the fiscal stalemate to slash the federal work force. Yet the president appeared unfazed by the decision, threatening soon after to cut federal agencies, fire more workers and rearrange the budget while the government remained at a standstill.
In a sharp and lengthy rebuke, Judge Susan Illston of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California raised deep unease about the actions of the White House, just days after the government began to lay off about 4,000 workers across eight federal agencies.
The early evidence, according to Judge Illston, suggested that the White House budget office had “taken advantage of the lapse in government spending and government functioning to assume that all bets are off, that the laws don’t apply to them anymore and they can impose the structures that they like.”
The judge also pointed to comments by Mr. Trump, who has frequently threatened to harm Democrats during the shutdown, and the words of and policy memos issued by his top aides, which Judge Illston presented as a sign of the “politics that infuses what is going on.”
“There are laws which govern how we can do the things we do,” she said.
Judge Illston, who ruled from the bench, did not detail the exact scope of her order and the agencies to which it would apply, saying she would offer more details soon in writing. But unions representing federal workers, which had challenged the legality of the firings, said they expected the result would halt many of the layoffs that the administration had ordered or contemplated in recent days.
“This decision affirms that these threatened mass firings are likely illegal and blocks layoff notices from going out,” said Lee Saunders, the president of AFSCME, one of the unions that had sued.
At a minimum, the court ruling on Wednesday suggested that serious legal hurdles may stand in the way of Mr. Trump, who has relished the “unprecedented opportunity” of the fiscal stalemate that has now entered its third week.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment, and the Justice Department declined to comment. But Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, said in an interview on “The Charlie Kirk Show” that the administration was eyeing more substantial layoffs that could number around 10,000, far beyond what has already been announced.
Since the shutdown began on Oct. 1, Mr. Trump has made clear that he hopes to whittle down government through steep budget cuts, and to punish Democrats over their refusal to accept Republicans’ fiscal demands.
The president has halted billions of dollars in federal aid to Democratic-led cities and states, and he plans to unveil his latest punitive measure on Friday, when he will release a list of cuts targeting “Democrat programs.”
“It’s thousands of people and it’s billions of dollars,” Mr. Trump told reporters at the White House, without acknowledging the loss his administration had just suffered in court.
The president has also tried to insulate himself from the political costs of a shutdown that he has made no effort to resolve. He and his aides have already reprogrammed billions of dollars in unspent money without congressional approval, aiming to pay military service members and head off some of the economic consequences from a prolonged federal closure.
The political undercurrents in Mr. Trump’s actions factored heavily into the court hearing on Wednesday, which centered on the extent to which the administration can fire employees simply because federal funding for their positions has expired. The White House first made that unusual argument before the shutdown began, hoping to pressure Democrats into supporting a short-term measure to fund the government into November.
The unions, led by the American Federation of Government Employees, quickly argued that Mr. Trump could not remove civil servants without a clear directive from Congress — particularly when Washington is supposed to be providing only the most vital services.
In court filings, the labor groups said that a lapse in funding “does not repeal, vacate or otherwise have any effect” on the work of federal agencies, giving Mr. Trump no authority to target them with staffing cuts.
They also took issue with the way the administration had exempted officials performing the layoffs from the shutdown, when federal agencies are closed and hundreds of thousands of workers are furloughed.
“The harm is now,” said Danielle Leonard, a lawyer at the firm Altshuler Berzon who represented the unions.
The administration, in response, objected to the process by which unions brought their legal challenge, and the timing of it. Otherwise, the government generally asserted that Mr. Trump possessed vast power to reconfigure the federal work force, reprising an argument in a campaign that has already ousted hundreds of thousands of civil servants from government.
Last week, Justice Department lawyers also sent mixed messages about the administration’s intentions. It described layoffs at times as “hypothetical” while acknowledging the government had started to send out notices to more than 4,000 employees.
Those arguments frequently drew sharp retorts from Judge Illston, who pressed Elizabeth Hedges, a Justice Department lawyer, to explain the legality of the firings — only to be told by Ms. Hedges that the government “did not prepare to address that” at the hearing.
Judge Illston also raised concern with the fact that the Trump administration had made misstatements, corrections and omissions in its court documents, having failed to properly account for the size, scope and timing of the layoffs it was processing.
The Trump administration initially misstated to the court the number of federal employees who received notices or would be cut, and its timing for conducting the layoffs. It corrected those problems in an updated filing on Tuesday evening, indicating that there were fewer layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services than the administration had initially reported.
That confirmed earlier reports that the agency had erroneously sent layoff notices to hundreds of scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Many of those workers later had the notices rescinded.
Tony Romm is a reporter covering economic policy and the Trump administration for The Times, based in Washington.
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