A federal judge on Wednesday said she would issue an order requiring the government to reinstate hundreds of employees fired during the federal government shutdown and stop ongoing efforts to fire more federal workers.
Judge Susan Illston of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, at a hearing in a lawsuit brought by federal worker unions, criticized Trump administration efforts to continue layoffs despite a provision in the law that ended the longest federal government shutdown in history.
That short-term spending patch through Jan. 30 included a provision that prohibited the government from taking steps to “initiate, carry out, implement, or otherwise notice a reduction in force,” as well as a separate provision that would require the government to roll back the RIFs for employees fired during the shutdown.
Illston said the law around continuing layoffs during the short-term spending patch “imposes a limitation on what the government can do, and the government did what it was ordered not to do.”
Illston noted the “chaotic” nature of the firings, with some employees being told they would not be fired, only for the government to reverse itself days later. The firings have resulted in “whiplash” and real harms such as interruptions to health care coverage, Illston said.
“The situations that have brought this matter to court are truly extreme and require immediate action in my view,” Illston said.
Illston said she would issue the order later Wednesday, which could also include a delay to allow the government to appeal.
The American Federation of Government Employees and the American Foreign Service Association initially brought the suit in the days before the federal government shutdown, in response to an Office of Management and Budget memorandum about allowing reductions in force, or RIFs, during the government shutdown.
The case changed as the shutdown wore on, and Wednesday’s hearing covered two buckets of federal workers: those fired during the shutdown and those the government has tried to fire since the government opened back up. Earlier this month, Illston blocked the ongoing layoffs temporarily until Wednesday’s hearing.
Attorneys for the worker unions argued that the law required the government to stop any steps to enact pending RIFs and reinstate already fired employees. Danielle Leonard, attorney for the plaintiffs, said that “Congress did a remarkable thing” by passing the law amid the lawsuit.
“We have Congress stepping in here and being incredibly clear here about what the public interest is,” Leonard said.
Leonard said Congress laid out explicitly what should happen for the hundreds of employees who were fired during the shutdown as the government had been “squirrelly” about complying with such rules. In court filings, the worker unions said that both buckets of federal workers include several hundred employees each.
Brad Rosenberg, an attorney for the Justice Department, argued that the law did not cover ongoing Trump administration efforts to enact RIFs that predated the government shutdown but were executed during the current continuing resolution. Rosenberg said the word “otherwise” in the law meant that it only covered the “notices” of new RIFs, not the act of actually separating the employees from government service if the RIF process had already started.
“They are grafting language onto a statute that Congress did not include, and at the end of the day ‘separate’ does not appear in the continuing resolution,” Rosenberg said. “If Congress wanted to include the separation of employees it could have, but chose not to do so.”
When Rosenberg said it would be a “heavy lift” for agencies to rehire employees who were fired during the shutdown, Illston responded that “they should have been lifting since the statute was passed.”
Rosenberg also argued that Illston’s final order shouldn’t restrict the actions of the OMB or Office of Personnel Management, which issued memorandums about the legality of continuing RIFs while under the continuing resolution.
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