A federal judge in San Francisco has halted the Trump administration's plan to lay off thousands of federal employees during the ongoing government shutdown, ruling that the move may violate federal law and overstep executive authority. The decision temporarily spares roughly 4,100 federal workers who received termination notices last week and could affect more than 10,000 positions nationwide.
U.S. District Judge Susan Illston issued the temporary restraining order on Wednesday after several federal employee unions sued the administration, arguing that the government was using the lapse in funding as a pretext to pursue politically motivated job cuts. "As of right now, the (temporary restraining order) is in effect," Illston said in court, blocking further layoffs "while the unions' legal challenge plays out."
Illston, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, sharply criticized the administration's approach, saying she saw evidence that officials had "taken advantage of the lapse in government spending, in government functioning, to assume that all bets are off, that the laws don't apply to them anymore." She added, "The politics that infuses what's going on is being trumpeted out loud in this case. And there are laws which govern how we can do the things we do. Including laws which govern how we do (reductions in force)."
The judge's remarks appeared to reference statements from President Donald Trump, who has publicly defended the planned cuts as part of his effort to shrink what he calls a bloated federal bureaucracy. "We're getting rid of programs that we didn't like," Trump said earlier this week. "We're terminating those programs, and they're going to be terminated on a permanent basis, and it's thousands of people and it's billions of dollars."
The administration began issuing reduction-in-force notices to 4,100 employees across several federal agencies on Friday, following an Office of Management and Budget directive warning agencies to prepare for mass layoffs if Congress failed to pass a spending bill. The government shut down on October 1 after lawmakers deadlocked on a short-term funding measure.
Before the court ruling, OMB Director Russ Vought suggested the total number of job cuts could exceed 10,000. "We're definitely talking thousands of people," he said Wednesday on The Charlie Kirk Show. "I think we'll probably end up being north of 10,000." He added that the administration planned to be "very aggressive where we can be in shuttering the bureaucracy - not just the funding."
The rollout of the layoffs has been marked by confusion and errors. Hundreds of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention employees were mistakenly sent termination notices Friday evening, according to a court filing. The Department of Health and Human Services later admitted that about 1,760 employees had been incorrectly notified instead of the 982 staffers intended. The agency attributed the errors to "data discrepancies and processing errors."
Reduction-in-force notices have also been sent to employees at the Departments of Commerce, Education, Housing and Urban Development, Homeland Security, Treasury, and Energy, as well as to more than two dozen staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency.
