WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court cleared the way Tuesday for the Trump administration to lay off tens of thousands of federal employees and downsize their agencies without seeking the approval of Congress.
In an 8-1 vote, the justices lifted an order from a federal judge in San Francisco who blocked mass layoffs at more than 20 departments and agencies.
The court has sided regularly with President Trump and his broad view of executive power on matters involving federal agencies.
In a brief order, the court said “the Government is likely to succeed on its argument that the Executive Order and Memorandum are lawful,” referring to the plans to reduce staffing. But it said it was not ruling on specific layoffs.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor concurred with the decision on the grounds that it was narrow and temporary.
Dissenting alone, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the court should not have intervened.
“Under our Constitution, Congress has the power to establish administrative agencies and detail their functions,” she wrote.
Since mid-April, the court has handed down a series of temporary orders that cleared the way for Trump’s planned cutbacks in funding and staffing at federal agencies.
Litigation will continue in the lower courts, but the justices are not likely to reverse course and rule next year that they made a mistake in allowing the staffing cutbacks to proceed.
The layoff case posed the question of whether Congress or the president had the authority to downsize agencies.
U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco said Congress, not the president, creates federal agencies and decides on their size and their duties.
“Agencies may not conduct large-scale reorganizations and reductions in force in blatant disregard of Congress’s mandates, and a president may not initiate large-scale executive branch reorganization without partnering with Congress,” she said on May 22.
Her order barred more than 20 departments and agencies from carrying out mass layoffs in response to an executive order from Trump.
They included the departments of Commerce, Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Labor, State, Treasury, Transportation and Veterans Affairs as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, the General Services Administration and the National Science Foundation.
She said the planned layoffs are large. The Health and Human Services department plans to cut 8,000 to 10,000 employees and the Energy Department 8,500. The Veterans Administration had planned to lay off 83,000 employees but said recently it will reduce that number to about 30,000.
Labor unions had sued to stop the layoffs as illegal.
Illson agreed that the agencies were not acting on their own to trim their staffs. Rather, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget under Russ Vought was leading the reorganization and restructuring of dozen of agencies. She said only Congress can reorganize agencies.
The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, by a 2-1 vote, turned down the administration’s appeal of the judge’s order.
Appealing to the Supreme Court, Trump’s lawyers insisted the president had the full authority to fire tens of thousands of employees.
“The Constitution does not erect a presumption against presidential control of agency staffing,” Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer said in his appeal, “and the President does not need special permission from Congress.”
He said federal law allows agencies to reduce their staffs.
“Neither Congress nor the Executive Branch has ever intended to make federal bureaucrats a class with lifetime employment, whether there was work for them to do or not,” Sauer wrote.
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