(TNND) — A U.S. district judge has granted a temporary restraining order blocking the mass layoff of federal workers during the government shutdown.
President Donald Trump and his budget chief, Russ Vought, sought to fire thousands of government employees with reduction-in-force notices going out late last week.
Workers from eight agencies got layoff notices, including Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development.
Some of the roughly 4,000 layoff notices were rescinded after officials discovered they were erroneously sent. But thousands of workers remained in danger of losing their jobs.
The American Federation of Government Employees and other groups sued to stop the layoffs and succeeded in getting a restraining order Wednesday from U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco.
Republican strategist Mehek Cooke applauded Trump’s layoffs in an op-ed that went up early Wednesday on Fox News’ website.
Cooke said Trump was “swinging the axe at bloated, Democrat-run bureaucracies that have taken trillions from hardworking Americans for decades.”
“Washington calls it chaos. I call it a cleanup — a reckoning long overdue in the deep-state swamp. For the first time in modern history, a shutdown isn’t about stalling — it’s about a president reshaping Washington for the people,” she continued.
AFGE National President Everett Kelley called the layoffs illegal.
“These workers show up every day to serve the American people, and for the past nine months have been met with nothing but cruelty and viciousness from President Trump,” Kelley said in a news release issued Friday, the day the layoff notices were also sent. “Every single American citizen should be outraged.”
Does Trump have the authority to lay off federal workers during the shutdown?
Thomas Berry, an attorney and the director of the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, said he doesn’t think so.
“I’m not convinced by their legal arguments,” Berry said Wednesday before the temporary restraining order had been announced.
Berry said a valid justification for implementing a reduction-in-force, or RIF, is if Congress repeals a statute that had established the requirement for a particular office or its employees.
Berry said the Trump administration is arguing that the lapse in funding during the shutdown is equivalent to repealing a statute, thus stopping the government activity.
If the activity is stopped, the employees are no longer needed.
“And that’s what I just find implausible, because there’s clearly a major difference between permanently repealing a statute that establishes certain activities or offices versus a temporary lapse in funding that everyone knows will revert back to the status quo at some point or another,” Berry said.
The challengers might also have another valid legal argument that the very people put in position to carry out the RIF shouldn’t be allowed to work during the shutdown, Berry said.
He said the administration is using different legal justification for this round of firings than it did earlier this year under the Department of Government Efficiency.
DOGE justified its activity by saying it was reevaluating how many people were needed to efficiently carry out statutory mandates.
“But they still were acknowledging that these offices had a statutory mandate to continue existing,” Berry said. “So, for example, they might leave it very small. They might leave only one or two people in an office that used to have dozens of people, but they still acknowledged that they had to continue because Congress had established them, and those statutes had not been repealed. This is a very different argument, because in a way, this argument that they’re making now is even more expansive.”
Mark Jones, a political science fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute, said the latest round of layoffs follows Trump’s “standard practice of pushing the envelope on what is legally permissible or allowable for a president.”
“In some ways, it’s a win-win scenario for the Trump administration,” Jones said.
Trump is trying to pressure Democrats to agree to the GOP stopgap bill to end the shutdown. Democrats are holding out for health care concessions.
And if successful, the move also helps achieve one of the administration’s broader goals of reducing the size of the federal bureaucracy.
But even if Trump isn’t successful on either front, Jones said the shutdown RIFs can send a powerful message to the federal workforce that there’s still a “target on your back.”
“It may indirectly help achieve some of the Trump administration goals of reducing the size of the federal bureaucracy, with some federal workers considering this to be the last straw” and voluntarily looking for jobs outside the federal government, Jones said.
Cooke, who wrote the Fox News op-ed, referred to Trump’s efforts to drain the “swamp.”
Jones said most would agree that there were reforms that were needed in the federal bureaucracy.
“But I think it’s questionable if the way the Trump administration is going about it is the optimal way,” he said.
Still, Jones said he understands the administration’s reluctance to go with a more deliberate approach that might not bear fruit for years to come.
“There is some logic to the way the Trump administration has done it,” Jones said. “It’s messy, and it’s inefficient. And it certainly is going to often cause more damage than good. But given their goals, it isn’t … an irrational process to follow.”
