A federal judge said late Thursday that she will continue to halt President Donald Trump’s orders for mass terminations at several agencies, handing down a preliminary injunction that follows up the temporary restraining order she issued earlier this month.
The new order is set to escalate a legal fight that the Justice Department has took to the Supreme Court, in an aggressive maneuver last week that has not yet prompted a response from the high court.
The latest ruling from Senior Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco also goes further than the temporary restraining order because she is ordering the reinstatement of employees on administrative leave, although, she has paused that aspect of her order so it can be appealed.
The case is a major roadblock in the president’s efforts to drastically shrink the federal bureaucracy. Tens of thousands of federal employees have been placed on administrative leave under the actions challenged in the lawsuit, but those terminations will not be finalized while IIlston’s order is in effect. The latest order will likely jumpstart the appellate battle over Trump’s power to, without Congress’s authorization, gut the workforces of agencies across the government.
The administration’s emergency appeals of her earlier temporary restraining order are pending both at the Supreme Court and the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals. However, those appeals courts may have been waiting for a preliminary injunction to intervene, as TROs are only appealable in limited circumstances.
Illston, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton , said in the Thursday opinion that the, “President has the authority to seek changes to executive branch agencies, but he must do so in lawful ways and, in the case of large-scale reorganizations, with the cooperation of the legislative branch.”
She foreshadowed her conclusions at a Thursday hearing, telling the lawyers she was likely to grant the order, as the evidence “strongly suggests” that the executive branch “usurped the constitutional powers of Congress.”
CNN has reached out to the White House for comment on the order.
The case revolves around a February executive order from Trump that seeks to conduct a “critical transformation of the Federal bureaucracy” and directives from the Office of Personnel Management and Office of Management and Budget that stemmed from it. Those directives instructed government agencies to submit plans for approval by the offices for mass terminations, known as reductions in force.
The challengers in the case – unions, local governments, and outside groups – also targeted the involvement of the Department of Government Efficiency. They argued that the top-down decisions by DOGE, OMB and OPM demanding extensive layoffs and crippling the agencies’ operations were unlawful.
“With every move this President is making, we are holding him accountable in court, and seeing judges of all stripes recognize and defend the rule of law,” said Skye Perryman, President & CEO of lead co-counsel Democracy Forward, one of the plaintiffs in the case. “We will continue to lawyer up and level up to protect the American people and our democracy.”
An attorney for the Justice Department argued the plans were just preparatory documents and that the agencies were given discretion to determine how far the cuts could go without interfering with their statutory functions.
Danielle Leonard, an attorney for the challengers, countered, “we don’t live in the hypothetical world that government counsel wants to live in.” She pointed to evidence in the case suggesting that OPM and OMB were rejecting proposals from agencies that would have staved off drastic cuts.
“They have taken the decision-making away from the agencies,” she said.
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