The Supreme Court is allowing the Trump administration to move forward with its plans to fire thousands of probationary federal employees, overturning a lower court order preventing the terminations.
The Supreme Court lifted an injunction Tuesday from a California federal court barring the Trump administration from firing employees across six federal agencies. The lower court order came last month following a lawsuit from the American Federation of Government Employees, a powerful public sector union.
“The District Court's injunction was based solely on the allegations of the nine non-profit-organization plaintiffs in this case. But under established law, those allegations are presently insufficient to support the organizations' standing,” the justices said in an unsigned ruling.
Liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the court’s order. Sotomayor did not explain her reasoning, while Jackson said the Trump administration failed to demonstrate the urgency of the issue.
The progressive labor union asked a San Francisco federal court to prevent the White House from firing 16,000 executive employees, in the Department of Agriculture, Treasury, Defense, Veterans’ Affairs, Interior, and Energy. The AFGE and its allies argued the Office of Personnel Management was overstepping its authority in making the terminations.
“Despite this setback, our coalition remains unwavering in fighting for these workers who were wronged by the administration, and in protecting the freedoms of the American people. This battle is far from over,” the union and its allies said in a statement.
It marks the latest instance of the Supreme Court exercising its authority to prevent a liberal district court judge from using a nationwide injunction to block President Donald Trump’s executive action. Trump and congressional Republicans have accused the liberal judges of deliberately overstepping their authority to prevent the president from exercising executive powers well within his Constitutional purview.
The Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency has attempted to dramatically overhaul the federal bureaucracy and cut the scale of the administrative state, with mixed results so far. Outwardly headed by billionaire Elon Musk, DOGE has tried to fire employees at various agencies and reduce government waste, fraud, and abuse at the federal level. President Trump remains supportive of Musk and DOGE’s work inside federal agencies, but has limited Musk’s power to ensure cabinet heads are able to oversee the firings.
The Supreme Court’s ruling did not address a separate lower court ruling in Maryland preventing the Trump administration from firing probationary employees working in 19 states and Washington, D.C., a ruling that followed a lawsuit from the states in question.
The Maryland case covers the same six agencies and over a dozen others for the workers in D.C. and the 19 Democratic states that brought the case. Probationary employees not in those states can now be fired because of the Supreme Court’s decision.
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