A federal judge in California has temporarily blocked any further mass layoffs of federal employees, thwarting President Donald Trump‘s efforts to reshape the federal government in his own image… for now.
San Francisco-based Judge Susan Illston issued the emergency order in response to a lawsuit filed by labor unions and multiple cities last week as part of a number of legal challenges to Trump’s attempts to downsize the federal government by laying off thousands of workers and eliminating entire agencies.
The order means that the administration’s plans to fire workers at departments including State, Treasury, Veterans Affairs, Social Security, and Transportation are on hold for two weeks.
In her order, Judge Illston said that the administration had made it clear that it “intends to change the way the federal government operates,” and that while federal courts “should not micromanage” the federal workforce, they must sometimes “act to preserve the proper checks and balances between the three branches of government.”
As a result, Illston wrote, “The Court holds the President likely must request Congressional cooperation to order the changes he seeks, and thus issues a temporary restraining order to pause large-scale reductions in force in the meantime.“
The order does not require departments that have already conducted layoffs to rehire fired employees, but to cease sending out any new reduction-in-force notifications until May 23. At many agencies, layoffs were scheduled to begin in less than two weeks.
Agencies specifically named in the order include the departments of Labor, State, Treasury, Energy, Commerce, Health and Human Services, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture, Veterans Affairs, DOGE, the Office of Management and Budget, the Office of Personnel Management, the National Labor Relations Board, the National Science Foundation, AmeriCorps, the Social Security Administration, and the Small Business Administration.
Several of those departments have already announced layoffs, including the Department of Health and Human Services, which later reversed some of the cuts after realizing that they had fired the wrong people. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said of the slip-up, “Personnel that should not have been cut were cut—we’re reinstating them, and that was always the plan.”
While there are no official figures regarding exactly how many federal employees have been let go, at least 75,000 have taken deferred resignation, and thousands of employees who were on probation have been let go.
Plaintiffs in the lawsuit have argued that Trump’s executive order violates the Constitution and circumvents federal laws that require the government to give federal employees at least 60 days of advance notice and consider their veteran status, length of service, and whether employees can be reassigned. Plaintiffs in the case include the cities of Chicago, San Francisco, and Baltimore and groups like the American Federation of Government Employees, the Alliance for Retired Americans, the Center for Taxpayer Rights, and the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks.
An earlier lawsuit brought by some of the same groups resulted in Judge William Alsup ordering the government to reinstate fired federal employees, but the Supreme Court later blocked this order.
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