The Supreme Court on Tuesday lifted a temporary pause on a Trump administration plan to fire thousands of federal employees, opening the door to potential mass layoffs across the country.
The unsigned order and opinion lifted a lower court’s pause on the administration’s plan while the court case plays out. In the interim, the administration can start to carry out its broader plan at agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Social Security Administration.
“Because the Government is likely to succeed on its argument that the Executive Order and Memorandum are lawful — and because the other factors bearing on whether to grant a stay are satisfied — we grant the application,” the order said.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, arguing that the court was going out of its way to undo a temporary measure meant to stop a massive restructuring of the federal government without input from Congress.
“That temporary, practical, harm-reducing preservation of the status quo was no match for this Court’s demonstrated enthusiasm for greenlighting this President’s legally dubious actions in an emergency posture,” Jackson wrote.
Trump’s executive order in February sought to make a “critical transformation” in the federal government. The order directed the Office of Management and Budget to create a 4 to 1 departure to hiring ratio across the federal government and directed federal agencies to initiate “large scale reductions in force.”
The order was challenged in court by the American Federation of Government Employees and other groups that said it violated federal administrative law. A federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California agreed and issued a temporary pause in May of administration work to implement the order.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit upheld that temporary pause. Then the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene, resulting in Tuesday’s order.
Tuesday’s order left open the possibility of court challenges to individual actions taken by agencies to implement the order, a fact mentioned by Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her separate opinion Tuesday. Sotomayor wrote that the order itself directed agencies to carry out their plans “consistent with applicable law.”
“The plans themselves are not before this Court, at this stage, and we thus have no occasion to consider whether they can and will be carried out consistent with the constraints of law,” Sotomayor wrote.
Since the start of the second Trump term, the Supreme Court has repeatedly lifted lower-court rulings restricting his actions, including in a ruling last month that restricted lower-court judges’ ability to issue nationwide injunctions.
The case is Donald J. Trump, president of the United States, et al. v. American Federation of Government Employees, et al.
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