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.
In a sharp and lengthy rebuke that preceded her ruling, Judge Susan Illston of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California repeatedly questioned the legality and political motivations behind the cuts just days after the White House took steps to dismiss roughly 4,000 federal workers.
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 President Trump, who has 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.
The decision marked an early victory for unions, including the American Federation of Government Employees, which sued and sought the temporary restraining order to prevent what they described as illegal firings. Judge Illston said she would detail the exact scope of her ruling later in writing, as the legal wrangling over the merits of the case continues.
But her comments in the meantime were striking, suggesting that serious legal hurdles stand in the way of Mr. Trump, who has relished the “unprecedented opportunity” afforded to him by a shutdown that has now entered its third week.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, said in an interview on “The Charlie Kirk Show” that aired on Wednesday that the administration was eyeing more substantial layoffs that could number around 10,000.
In recent days, Mr. Trump has made clear that he hopes to whittle down government through steep budget cuts, even though Congress has not approved them, and to punish Democrats over their refusal to accept Republicans’ fiscal demands. He plans to unveil his latest punitive measure on Friday, with the release of a list outlining additional cuts to “Democrat programs.”
Mr. Trump’s threats factored heavily into the hearing on Wednesday, which centered on the extent to which the administration may fire employees simply because federal funding for their positions has expired. The unions, led by the American Federation of Government Employees, argued that Mr. Trump cannot remove civil servants without a clear directive from Congress — particularly when Washington is supposed to be performing only the most vital services.
In previous 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. Unions have also pointed to the president’s repeated threats to slash “Democrat programs” as a sign the layoffs were politically motivated.
“The harm is now,” said Danielle Leonard, a lawyer at the firm Altshuler Berzon who represented the unions.
The administration, in response, has generally asserted that Mr. Trump possesses vast power to reconfigure the federal work force, reprising a familiar argument in a legally contested campaign that has already ousted hundreds of thousands of civil servants from government.
Last week, Justice Department lawyers primarily objected to the process by which unions brought their legal challenge, and the timing of it. In doing so, the administration sent mixed messages about its intentions. It described layoffs at times as “hypothetical” while acknowledging the government had started to send out notices to more than 4,000 employees.
The Trump administration’s arguments — and its handling of the layoffs — drew frequent, sharp retorts from Judge Illston on Wednesday.
She repeatedly 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.”
Judge Illston also raised concern with the fact that the 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 in one case that there were fewer layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services than the administration had initially reported.
The agency 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.
The post Judge Temporarily Blocks Trump Layoffs During Shutdown appeared first on New York Times.
