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Ceding to Trump, Supreme Court rejects move to bring back federal workers [1]
['Kelsey Reichmann']
Date: 2025-04
WASHINGTON (CN) — President Donald Trump triumphed at the Supreme Court on Tuesday, receiving an emergency pause to the reinstatement of thousands of probationary federal employees terminated in a firing spree.
The justices said a lower court ordered Trump to rehire employees based solely on the accusations of nine nonprofit organizations, which the high court found insufficient to support the organizations’ standing.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a Barack Obama appointee, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Joe Biden appointee, would have denied the application.
Jackson noted that she wouldn’t have weighed in on the organizations’ standing on the emergency docket. Her reasoning mirrors a separate emergency appeal where she critiqued her conservative colleagues for deciding legal questions without full briefing and oral arguments. In Jackson’s view, Trump did not face irreparable harm warranting urgent action from the court.
Trump asked the justices to step in after a federal judge ordered the administration to restore over 16,000 probationary workers to their posts across a half-dozen departments and agencies. The administration claimed judicial interference in executive branch activities, but worker advocates said it was the Trump administration that exceeded its authority and then lied about it.
“Reflecting the weakness of the government’s authority, numerous courts have reinstated federal employees to their positions or prevented their removal from taking effect,” the nonprofits wrote.
Earlier this year, Trump and White House adviser Elon Musk took a chainsaw to federal employment as the government targets financial waste in the system. Probationary workers were the first on the list to go.
These are typically new entrants into the service with a year or less on the job. However, this can also apply to federal employees who take on new roles in the workforce.
Unlike political appointees, civil servants are protected from at-will firing and can only face immediate termination for poor performance or misconduct. Federal workers fired in the administration’s purge last month reported receiving “performance-based” terminations, which came as a shock to employees who had only received positive reviews or had never been evaluated due to their short tenure.
Labor unions and advocacy groups pinned the blame on Charles Ezell, the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management, claiming he ordered the firings through a template letter that falsely stated that the terminations were for performance reasons.
Senior U.S. District Judge William Alsup, a Bill Clinton appointee, said the Office of Personnel Management didn’t have the authority to tell federal agencies to fire employees and ordered a temporary pause on the terminations.
Trump appealed, arguing that Alsup had no jurisdiction over personnel actions. However, even if federal courts had the authority, the government claimed that the terminations came from the agencies — not Alsup. Since it was agencies acting and not the Office of Personnel Management, the Justice Department said Alsup's order only clarified the agencies' independence.
Alsup was not the only target of the administration's scorn, however; the Justice Department used its emergency appeal to attack judges who ruled against them.
“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,” the government wrote.
Trump stressed the enormity of reinstating over 16,000 employees, but the workers’ advocates said the ruling was only as broad as needed to address the havoc caused by the initial firings.
“The scale of the task is simply a reflection of the scale of the government’s own unlawful action and its ‘move fast and break things’ ethos,” the nonprofits wrote. “Accepting the government’s argument would mean that it can act lawlessly as long as it acts quickly and destructively enough that restoring the status quo would be an ‘enormous’ task. That is not and cannot be the law.”
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