A US district judge stopped the Trump administration from firing thousands of federal workers during the continuing government shutdown on Wednesday. Judge Susan Illston of the US District Court in San Francisco issued a temporary restraining order, saying that the mass layoffs seemed to be politically motivated, illegal, and done “without much thought.”
The decision came as the government shutdown, which started on October 1, entered its third week with no end in sight. Democratic lawmakers want any compromise to reopen the government to include extending healthcare subsidies and reversing recent cuts to Medicaid. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said, “I will not negotiate” on these demands.
Judge Doesn’t Like the “Ready, Fire, Aim” Method
Judge Illston asked the administration many times why they were sending out more than 4,100 layoff notifications last Friday across eight federal departments. She said that the timing has had a huge impact on both logistics and people, as furloughed staff can’t check their work emails and there aren’t any human resources specialists accessible to help them figure out what to do next.
Judge Illston observed, “It’s very much ready, fire, aim on most of these programs, and it has a human cost.” “It is a cost to people that cannot be tolerated.”
She gave the order because she thought the facts would eventually reveal that the job cuts were unconstitutional and went beyond the administration’s power. In a similar case before this one, Judge Illston stopped the administration from cutting the size of the federal workforce. However, the Supreme Court later let the administration continue dismissing people while the main lawsuit was going on.
Unions Say Layoffs Are “Cruel and Unlawful”
The American Federation of Government Employees and other federal labor unions asked for the ruling. The unions said that the firings were an unconstitutional attempt to put political pressure on Congress and punish them, based on the fallacious idea that a short break in funding means that Congress can’t authorize agency activities.
Skye Perryman, president and CEO of the legal group Democracy Forward, spoke out against what the administration did: “Our civil servants do the work of the people, and messing with their jobs is cruel and illegal and a threat to everyone in our country.”
The Trump administration has been able to keep paying the military and funding its immigration enforcement, but it has been cutting positions in departments that Democrats like, such as special education and after-school programs. In the past, President Trump said that the programs being targeted “are never going to come back, in many cases.”
In court, Assistant US Attorney Elizabeth Hedges, who represented the government, said that the district court did not have the authority to hear employment decisions made by federal agencies. The court pushed Hedges to concede that she was not ready to talk about the reasons for the mass firings.
The White House told anybody who wanted to know about the ruling to talk to the Office of Management and Budget. They didn’t react right away.