Judge orders temporary halt to Trump’s mass layoffs of federal workers

A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to halt mass layoffs of federal workers for at least two weeks in a temporary restraining order issued Friday.

A coalition of local governments, nonprofit organizations and labor unions, including the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest federal employee union, filed a lawsuit last month challenging an executive order issued Feb. 11 that instructed federal agency heads to prepare large-scale reductions in workforce.

The AFGE-led coalition had argued that the president does not have the power to make that order. Judge Susan Illston of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California said in her ruling that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on at least some of their claims and issued the temporary restraining order to stop layoffs as the case proceeds.

“To make large-scale overhauls of federal agencies, any president must enlist the help of his co-equal branch and partner, the Congress,” she wrote.

She added that the president does not have “constitutional nor, at this time, statutory authority to reorganize the executive branch.”

Attorneys for the Trump administration filed an appeal of the temporary restraining order to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, court records show.

At least 24,000 federal probationary employees have already been fired as part of the Trump administration’s push to shrink the government, according to court filings. The legality of those layoffs is separately undergoing challenge in the courts.

The AFGE-led coalition described its lawsuit as “the largest and most significant challenge to Trump’s authority to remake the government” without Congress’s approval, the Washington Post reported.

The executive order at issue, titled “Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative,” instructed federal agencies to work with the U.S. DOGE Service to enact a “critical transformation of the Federal bureaucracy” by downsizing.

Work had begun to enact the order, with at least tens of thousands of jobs slated for cuts across the federal bureaucracy, Illston said.

“Federal courts should not micromanage the vast federal workforce,” she wrote in the order, “but courts must sometimes act to preserve the proper checks and balances between the three branches of government.”