The U.S. Supreme Court has halted a lower court’s order that required the Biden administration to rehire thousands of federal employees who were previously fired under former President Donald Trump’s push to reduce the size of the federal workforce.
On Tuesday, the Court temporarily blocked an injunction issued on March 13 by U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco. That ruling had directed six federal departments to reinstate recently dismissed probationary workers while lawsuits challenging the legality of those terminations continue.
The departments involved were Defense, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Energy, Interior, and Treasury. Probationary employees are usually in their first year of service in a new position, although some have served in government roles for longer.
The Supreme Court’s decision mostly affects the Department of Defense and other employees outside states already covered by a similar ruling in a separate case in Maryland. In that case, another federal judge ordered the government to reinstate probationary workers at 18 federal agencies—but only those who live or work in Washington, D.C., or in one of the 19 states that joined the lawsuit.
The Defense Department has not disclosed how many workers it fired or rehired. However, it had previously aimed to remove about 5,400 probationary civilian employees.
In its unsigned order, the Supreme Court said that the nine nonprofit organizations who had originally filed the lawsuit did not have the legal standing to sue. The Court emphasized that it was not ruling on the claims of other plaintiffs, whose arguments had not been the basis for the lower court’s injunction.
Liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented publicly, signaling disagreement with the majority decision.
A coalition of labor unions, nonprofit organizations, and the Democratic-led state of Washington brought the lawsuit against the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. They argued that the agency overstepped its authority by coordinating mass firings and mislabeling them as performance-related dismissals.
In response to the Supreme Court’s decision, the coalition expressed disappointment but promised to continue the legal fight.
“There is no doubt that thousands of public service employees were unlawfully fired in an effort to cripple federal agencies and their crucial programs that serve millions of Americans,” the group said.
Eric Engle, a local union leader in Parkersburg, West Virginia, said the ruling could once again threaten the jobs of around 85 recently reinstated workers at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service. West Virginia is not part of the Maryland lawsuit, so its workers may not be protected.
“This is a nightmare for these poor people,” Engle said. “One of them had just returned to work an hour before we heard the ruling.”
He warned that the decision undermines long-standing civil service protections. “If the president can just ignore those protections and unions have no standing in court, then millions of workers are essentially living under a dictatorship,” he added.
Judge Alsup, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, had criticized the Trump administration for what he called an improper mass termination of workers. He questioned the government’s explanation that the firings were due to poor job performance. His ruling was previously upheld by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals before being blocked by the Supreme Court.
This decision is just one of several recent rulings where the high court has sided with the Trump administration’s efforts to reshape the federal government. On Monday, the Court allowed Trump to pursue deportations of suspected Venezuelan gang members under a rarely used 1798 law, originally meant for wartime. The Court also paused another order requiring the government to return a mistakenly deported Salvadoran man.
Last week, the Court allowed Trump’s administration to move forward with major cuts to teacher training grants, a move seen as part of his broader rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
Reported by Andrew Chung in New York; with additional reporting by John Kruzel and Idrees Ali in Washington, Nathan Layne in New York, and Dan Wiessner in Albany. Edited by Will Dunham.
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