Washington — The Trump administration on Monday asked the Supreme Court to pause a lower court decision that required six agencies to reinstate more than 16,000 federal probationary workers who were terminated.
The request for emergency relief from the Justice Department is the latest intervention the administration is seeking from the Supreme Court as it faces more than 100 lawsuits challenging President Trump’s policies. Already pending before the justices is a request to narrow injunctions that blocked implementation of Mr. Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship. A decision on that request isn’t expected until early next month.
The latest bid from the Trump administration arose out of U.S. District Judge William Alsup’s order earlier this month that required six agencies — the Departments of Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior and Treasury — to reinstate probationary workers who were fired last month.
In the challenge brought by a group of labor unions and nonprofit groups, the judge said the terminations were likely unlawful because the Office of Personnel Management did not have the authority to direct the firings.
But in the request to the Supreme Court, acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris wrote that the court’s preliminary injunction let third parties “hijack the employment relationship between the federal government and its workforce.”
“And, like many other recent orders, the court’s extraordinary reinstatement order violates the separation of powers, arrogating to a single district court the Executive Branch’s powers of personnel management on the flimsiest of grounds and the hastiest of timelines,” she wrote. “That is no way to run a government.”
Alsup’s order covers roughly 16,000 federal workers who were still in probationary status, or those generally in a one- or two-year trial period. A federal appeals court declined the Trump administration’s request to halt the decision, leading the Justice Department to ask the Supreme Court for relief.
“This court should not allow a single district court to erase Congress’s handiwork and seize control over reviewing federal personnel decisions — much less to do so by vastly exceeding the limits on the scope of its equitable authority and ordering reinstatements en masse,” Harris wrote.
The Trump administration argued that the district court’s order forces the government to embark on a “massive administrative undertaking” to reinstate and onboard thousands of fired employees in just a few days.
The firings of probationary workers came as part of Mr. Trump’s broad initiative to shrink the size of the federal government, an effort that is being undertaken by the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency.
More than 24,000 probationary workers were removed from their positions as part of the mass firings, the Justice Department revealed in a court filings submitted in a separate case challenging the terminations, which was brought in Maryland and involves 18 agencies.
The judge overseeing that case also temporarily blocked the mass firings and ordered the affected federal workers at the agencies to be reinstated.
As the legal challenges to Mr. Trump’s second-term agenda make their way through the federal courts, the president and his Republican allies have launched attacks on district court judges who have issued temporary orders blocking enforcement of the policies while proceedings move forward.
Mr. Trump and Elon Musk, a senior White House adviser, have repeatedly called for some of the judges to be impeached, though it’s unlikely any effort to remove them would be successful. But the president and GOP lawmakers have also condemned the relief the judges are issuing, and particularly the fact that they apply nationwide.
In Supreme Court filings in the case involving Mr. Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order, Harris urged the justices to rein in the use of nationwide injunctions.
“Government-by-universal-injunction has persisted long enough, and has reached a fever pitch in recent weeks,” she wrote. “It is long past time to restore district courts to their ‘proper — and properly limited — role … in a democratic society.'”
Harris reiterated that request Monday in the dispute over the mass firings of federal workers, urging the high court to “end the interbranch power grab.”
“Those orders have sown chaos as the Executive Branch scrambles to meet immediate compliance deadlines by sending huge sums of government money out the door, reinstating thousands of lawfully terminated workers, undoing steps to restructure Executive Branch agencies, and more,” she wrote. “The lower courts should not be allowed to transform themselves into all-purpose overseers of Executive Branch hiring, firing, contracting, and policymaking.”
