A judge in San Francisco on Wednesday temporarily barred the Trump administration from laying off federal employees during the shutdown, saying the firings come at “a human cost.”
US District Judge Susan Illston said during a hearing Wednesday in San Francisco federal court that the planned job cuts of thousands of government workers seemed to be politically motivated, poorly planned and would damage lives.
“It’s very much ready, fire, aim on most of these programs, and it has a human cost,” said Illston — an appointee of former Democratic President Bill Clinton.
“It’s a human cost that cannot be tolerated.”
Illston pressed government lawyers during Wednesday’s hearing about why the administration was taking the drastic step while furloughed employees didn’t have access to their work email accounts and there weren’t human resource employees currently available to implement the layoffs.
Illston sided with groups of federal employees who are suing over the cuts and issued a temporary restraining order to halt the firing on the grounds they were likely illegal and exceeded the government’s authority.
The judge said the administration seems to have “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 any more and that they can impose the structures that they like,” according to a report by Politico.
Earlier in the hearing, Assistant US Attorney Elizabeth Hedges opposed the TRO and argued judges don’t have the power to interfere with federal agencies’ employment choices. Hedges repeatedly declined to answer Illston’s question about whether the job cuts were legally justified.
The American Federation of Government Employees and other federal labor unions that are suing, claiming the layoff notices were meant as retaliation and to apply political pressure. They also claimed that Congress ultimately has the power over agency decision-making, not the administration.
The shutdown is in its third week since going into effect on Oct. 1.
On Friday, the administration notified the court that it was firing over 4,100 workers in eight agencies.
Democratic lawmakers have demanded that health care subsidies be extended another year and that Trump’s Medicaid slashes, passed in a bill this summer, be reversed before they agree to reopen the government.
But Republican legislators have said the government shutdown should come to an end first and they can negotiate the demands of their counterparts after.
US House Speaker Mike Johnson has said this could be the longest shutdown the country has seen and noted he “won’t negotiate” with the other side of the aisle until they drop their demands.
The White House and the Office of Management and Budget didn’t immediately return requests for comment Wednesday.
With Post wires
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