Trump urges Supreme Court to stop judge’s order to rehire federal workers

The Trump administration on Monday urged the Supreme Court to block a federal judge’s ruling that reinstates thousands of probationary federal employees who were dismissed as part of the government’s rapid workforce downsize efforts.

According to a CNN report, the emergency appeal is the administration’s latest attempt to seek intervention from the country’s highest court as lower courts impede significant aspects of President Donald Trump’s second-term agenda, even on a temporary basis.

In this case, a federal judge in San Francisco issued a preliminary injunction earlier this month, mandating that several federal agencies “immediately” offer over 16,000 probationary employees their positions back.

“The district court’s extraordinarily overbroad remedy is now inflicting ongoing, irreparable harm on the Executive Branch that warrants this Court’s urgent intervention,” CNN quoted acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris as writing in court papers.

Harris went on to say that the ruling from US District Judge William Alsup “has compelled the government to embark on the massive administrative undertaking of reinstating, and onboarding to full duty status, thousands of terminated employees in the span of a few days.”

The administration’s request coincides with the federal appeals court in San Francisco reviewing a similar emergency appeal from the administration, which was submitted on March 14.

“Every additional day the injunction remains in effect is a day that six executive agencies are effectively under the district court’s receivership, necessitating immediate relief from this Court,” CNN quoted Harris as arguing.

Alsup’s ruling marked a rare victory for federal labour groups opposing the administration’s workforce reduction efforts.

While other federal judges refused to intervene during the initial wave of firings in the early weeks of Trump’s second term, Alsup said he made his decision based on his belief that the Office of Personnel Management had unlawfully instructed agencies to lay off probationary employees, most of whom had been on the job for less than a year.

“Each agency had (and still has) discretion to hire and fire its own employees. Here, the agencies were directed by OPM to fire all probationary employees, and they executed that directive. To staunch the irreparable harms to organisational plaintiffs caused by OPM unlawfully slashing other agency’s staff required immediately reinstating those employees,” Alsup, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, wrote in his ruling.

The ruling arose from a case initiated by labor unions and others contesting the OPM’s involvement in the firings, which impacted thousands of employees and caused significant disruption across various federal agencies, some of which later rehired certain workers.

The Trump administration has focused on probationary employees due to their limited job protections, making it easier for them to be dismissed. While these workers typically cannot appeal their terminations to the Merit Systems Protection Board, they can do so if the dismissal was based on “partisan political reasons” or “marriage status.”

Harris informed the Supreme Court that “some” of the terminated probationary employees have submitted complaints to the Office of Special Counsel, arguing that Alsup’s ruling conflicted with the administrative processes established by Congress to handle such terminations.

“Declaring open season on challenges to federal personnel management is especially unsound because Congress has created an entirely different framework for resolving legal challenges to the terminations of federal employees,” she wrote, adding that allowing the unions “to head straight to district court and raise claims that the affected federal employees themselves cannot raise would upend that entire process.”

With inputs from agencies