By Andrew Chung
(Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court blocked on Tuesday a judge’s order for President Donald Trump’s administration to rehire thousands of fired employees, acting in a dispute over his effort to slash the federal workforce and dismantle parts of the government.
The court put on hold San Francisco-based U.S. Judge William Alsup’s March 13 injunction requiring six federal agencies to reinstate thousands of recently hired probationary employees while litigation challenging the legality of the dismissals continues.
The court in a brief, unsigned order said the nine non-profit organizations who were granted an injunction in response to their lawsuit lacked the legal standing to sue. The court said that its order did not address claims by other plaintiffs in the case, “which did not form the basis of the district court’s preliminary injunction.”
Liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson publicly dissented from the decision.
Alsup’s ruling applied to probationary employees at the U.S. Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy, Department of Interior and the Treasury Department.
In a separate case, a federal judge in Baltimore also ordered the administration to reinstate thousands of fired probationary workers at 18 federal agencies in 19 mostly Democratic-led states and Washington, D.C., which had sued over the mass firings.
Trump and billionaire advisor Elon Musk have moved quickly to shrink the federal bureaucracy and remake the government.
The administration had urged the Supreme Court to lift Alsup’s order, contending that the judge had overstepped his authority in directing the reinstatement of 16,000 employees. The administration also castigated orders by a number of judges that have impeded more broadly some of the Republican president’s policies since he returned to office in January.
The judge faulted the administration for improperly terminating en masse the probationary workers and cast doubt on the justification presented by the government that the firings were the result of poor employee performance.
Probationary workers typically have less than one year of service in their current roles, though some are longtime federal employees serving in new roles.
Alsup, an appointee of Democratic former President Bill Clinton, said at an earlier hearing in the case: “It is a sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that’s a lie.”
The San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals refused on March 26 to halt Alsup’s order.
Alsup’s order, the Justice Department wrote in a filing, let the plaintiffs in the case “hijack the employment relationship between the federal government and its workforce,” violating the separation of power between the judiciary and executive branches of the government as laid out in the U.S. Constitution.
The judge earlier questioned the administration’s compliance with his injunction, criticizing the decision to place the employees on administrative leave rather than send them back to work. The Justice Department responded that placing workers on leave was the first in a series of steps toward fully reinstating them and “administrative leave is not being used to skirt the requirement of reinstatement.”
Tuesday’s decision was the latest in recent days in which the Supreme Court sided with Trump. In a 5-4 decision on Monday, it allowed Trump to pursue deportations of alleged Venezuelan gang members using a 1798 law that historically has been employed only in wartime, but with certain limits. In a 5-4 decision on Friday, it let Trump’s administration proceed with millions of dollars of cuts to teacher training grants – part of his crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
The court earlier on Monday also temporarily halted a judge’s order requiring the administration to return by the end of the day a Salvadoran man who the government has acknowledged was deported in error to El Salvador.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung; additional reporting by John Kruzel in Washington)
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