The Trump administration is urging the Supreme Court to allow its plans to fire thousands of federal workers to proceed.
In an emergency appeal on Friday, the administration pushed the highest court in the country to lift an order by a lower court temporarily stopping the firings.
It’s the latest attempt by the administration to cut back the federal workforce, and it came after the Supreme Court lifted a lower court order last month that blocked mass layoffs of probationary workers at six departments, Politico reported.
The new attempt is an even broader effort to fire federal workers, which several agencies are looking to terminate according to an executive order from February that states that “Agency Heads shall promptly undertake preparations to initiate large-scale reductions in force.”
Last week, Clinton appointee U.S. District Judge Susan Illston blocked the administration from enacting the firings.
In his appeal to the Supreme Court, Solicitor General John Sauer claimed that the judge incorrectly encroached on President Donald Trump’s “unquestioned legal authority to plan and carry out” firings and to reorganize the federal workers.
“More concretely, the order has brought to a halt numerous in-progress [reductions in force] at more than a dozen federal agencies, compelling the government to retain — at taxpayer expense — thousands of employees whose continuance in federal service is determined by agencies not to be in the government and public interest,” Sauer wrote, claiming that the order from Illston has stopped 40 current reductions in force at 17 agencies.
Trump’s order was challenged by the largest federal workers’ unions in the U.S. as well as a number of nonprofit organizations and local governments. Additionally, more than 20 Democratic-leaning states have filed briefs in support of the workers.
Illston held that the Trump administration isn’t adhering to the legal and procedural requirements that apply when governments want to enact mass firings, such as the amount of time that a worker has been at an agency.
She noted that a president has to have “the cooperation of the legislative branch” when putting in place massive reorganizations that the president is pushing for. Illston noted that Trump called on Congress to pass a bill to support similar efforts during his first stint in the White House.
The order issued by Illston shielded 21 agencies, including the Department of Government Efficiency, as well as the departments of Commerce, Energy, Interior, Health and Human Services, State, Labor, Transportation, Treasury, Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture, Veterans Affairs, the Office of Management and Budget, the Office of Personnel Management, the National Labor Relations Board, National Science Foundation, Small Business Administration, Americorps, and Social Security Administration.
