The Supreme Court on Tuesday granted the Trump administration’s bid to halt a trial judge’s ruling that had blocked mass layoffs of federal employees across the executive branch, while litigation in the case proceeds.
The brief, unsigned order said the court granted the application because the government is “likely to succeed on its argument” that President Donald Trump’s executive order and memorandum calling on federal agency heads to prepare to initiate large-scale reductions in force, or RIFs, are “lawful.”
The order went on to note that the justices “express no view on the legality” of any agency’s specific employee reduction plans. “Those plans are not before this Court,” the order stated.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Biden appointee, was the only justice to provide a dissenting opinion. She wrote:
In my view, this was the wrong decision at the wrong moment, especially given what little this Court knows about what is actually happening on the ground. … This case is about whether that action amounts to a structural overhaul that usurps Congress’s policymaking prerogatives — and it is hard to imagine deciding that question in any meaningful way after those changes have happened. Yet, for some reason, this Court sees fit to step in now and release the President’s wrecking ball at the outset of this litigation.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor added a brief concurring opinion that said she agreed with Jackson that the president can’t restructure federal agencies inconsistently with congressional mandates. But she noted that Trump’s order directs agencies to plan reorganizations and RIFs “consistent with applicable law.”
Sotomayor further noted that those plans themselves aren’t before the court, “and we thus have no occasion to consider whether they can and will be carried out consistent with the constraints of law.” She said she joined the majority because the district court can still consider those questions “in the first instance,” so the matter may come before the justices again in the future.
In May, a federal judge in San Francisco issued a preliminary injunction that paused RIFs and reorganization of the executive branch in a lawsuit brought by unions, nonprofits and local governments. Siding with the plaintiffs, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston observed that Congress “creates federal agencies, funds them, and gives them duties that — by statute — they must carry out.” The Clinton appointee said agencies “may not conduct large-scale reorganizations and reductions in force in blatant disregard of Congress’s mandates, and a President may not initiate large-scale executive branch reorganization without partnering with Congress.”
A divided federal appellate panel refused to halt the injunction, prompting Solicitor General John Sauer’s Supreme Court application. He complained that the injunction “rests on the indefensible premise that the President needs explicit statutory authorization from Congress to exercise his core Article II authority to superintend the internal personnel decisions of the Executive Branch.”
Opposing his application, the plaintiffs urged the justices to reject the request for Trump “to unilaterally dismantle agencies across the federal government without allowing the federal courts adequate opportunity to consider and rule on the serious separation of powers concerns raised by this assertion of authority.”
An amicus brief from former government officials and advisers told the justices that Illston “properly held that this sweeping reworking of federal agencies cannot be accomplished by Presidential fiat alone.” Another amicus brief, from the progressive Constitutional Accountability Center, said Trump’s attempt “to fundamentally reorganize the federal government without congressional consent, as well as his administration’s efforts to implement it, should remain enjoined to prevent further harm to our governmental structure.”
Tuesday’s order is the high court’s latest action on Trump’s power in his second term, in response to yet another appeal seeking speedy relief from a preliminary lower court ruling. In the most recent instance of a theme throughout his term, it involved a judge finding that Trump had exceeded his authority while his administration accused the judge of exceeding hers.
The justices have given Trump a mixed record in these high court outings but enough of an incentive to keep trying.
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