The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Monday to halt a lower court ruling that required six federal departments and agencies to reinstate more than 16,000 federal probationary employees it had fired.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit last week rejected a Trump administration request for an immediate halt to the district court order, with the appellate court saying a pausing of the order would disrupt the status quo.
In an application to the Supreme Court, the Justice Department said the district court had overstepped its authority. And they argue the judge erred when he issued a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit filed not by the workers themselves, but by groups “who claimed that these layoffs could contribute to downstream harms from less-robust governmental service.”
The American Federation of Government Employees and other organizations sued the Trump administration last month, arguing that the U.S. Office of Personnel Management lacked the constitutional authority to order federal agencies to fire probationary employees en masse.
The Justice Department, in the application, argued that the district court’s action “let third parties hijack the employment relationship between the federal government and its workforce.”
In a memorandum this month, Judge William Alsup for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California wrote that OPM “has no authority to hire and fire employees in another agency. Yet that is what happened here — en masse.”
The district court ordered the departments of Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior and Treasury to offer reinstatement to probationary employees fired on or about Feb. 13 and Feb. 14, the DOJ wrote.
“And, like many other recent orders, the court’s extraordinary reinstatement order violates the separation of powers, arrogating to a single district court the Executive Branch’s powers of personnel management on the flimsiest of grounds and the hastiest of timelines,” the Justice Department wrote.
“That is no way to run a government,” the department wrote.
The filing to the Supreme Court is the latest in a broader legal fight over the fate of thousands of probationary workers who were fired by the Trump administration, as it looks to downsize the federal government.
In a separate case out of Maryland, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reinstate probationary employees who were fired from a host of agencies and departments.
In that case, a coalition of states had sued, and the judge found the government conducted mass layoffs but did not give advance notice.
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