The Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked a ruling from a federal judge in California that had ordered the Trump administration to rehire thousands of fired federal workers who had been on probationary status.
The court’s brief order said the nonprofit groups that had sued to challenge the dismissals had not suffered the sort of injury that gave them standing to sue.
The practical consequences of the ruling may be limited, as another trial judge’s ruling requiring the reinstatement of many of the same workers remains in place.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, but she gave no reasons. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the court should not have ruled on such an important issue in the context of an emergency application.
The order was the latest administration victory in the Supreme Court in a case arising from President Trump’s recent blitz of executive orders. Like others, though, it was technical and tentative. The justices said their order would remain in place while the case moved forward.
The case concerned a preliminary injunction issued last month by a federal judge in California that ordered the administration to reinstate more than 16,000 probationary employees it had fired from the Pentagon, the Treasury, and the Agriculture, Energy, Veterans Affairs and Interior Departments.
In his ruling, Judge William H. Alsup, of the Northern District of California, acknowledged that “each federal agency has the statutory authority to hire and fire its employees, even at scale, subject to certain safeguards.”
But he wrote that the Office of Personnel Management, which he said had coordinated the terminations, had no authority to hire and fire employees in other agencies.
“Yet that is what happened here — en masse,” he wrote.
A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, declined to pause Judge Alsup’s order while the government pursued an appeal.
In an emergency application asking the Supreme Court to intervene, Sarah M. Harris, the acting solicitor general, wrote that federal judges have issued more than 40 temporary restraining orders or injunctions blocking administration programs. Many of them, she said, involved rulings that applied nationwide.
Judge Alsup’s order, she wrote, was particularly problematic.
“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,” Ms. Harris wrote. “That is no way to run a government. This court should stop the ongoing assault on the constitutional structure before further damage is wrought.”
In response, the labor unions and nonprofit groups challenging the firings said the administration should not be allowed to argue that unwinding the firings would be burdensome because that harm was self-inflicted.
“While the government complains that the reinstatement of more than 16,000 employees at the six covered agencies is an ‘enormous’ task that would interfere with agency functioning (without presenting evidence supporting that assertion),” the challengers’ brief said, “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.”
A different federal judge, James K. Bredar of the Federal District Court in Maryland, last month also ordered the administration to reinstate federal workers in a case brought by 19 states and the District of Columbia. Last week, in an 84-page decision, Judge Bredar again ruled for the states, though he limited the scope of his decision to people who live or work in those states and not in 31 others.
The administration has sought a stay of that ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which is expected to rule shortly.
