The Supreme Court gave the Trump administration the go-ahead to continue its program of mass federal firings on Tuesday.
In an unsigned order, the court removed a stay on Trump’s plan to significantly slash the federal workforce, a scheme first laid out in a February executive order. SCOTUS’ order said the court “express[ed] no view on the legality” of the Trump admin’s downsizing but added that the order and memo were “likely” to be found “lawful” if the case comes before the high court.
No tally was given in the court’s granting of the emergency application, but Justice Sonia Sotomayor offered a concurrence and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson issued a dissent. The latter warned of “enormous real-world consequences” and worried that the court was giving the green light to “the dismantling of much of the federal government as Congress has created it.”
The case in question that led a lower court to block the Trump administration’s actions was brought by the American Federation of Government Employees, the union representing nearly a million federal workers.
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U.S. District Judge Susan Illston issued the initial injunction, and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that the government was not likely to succeed on the merits and faced no obvious harm from the delay, denying a request to lift the order. With the Supreme Court’s complete reversal of the lower court’s orders, hundreds of thousands of federal employees could be at risk of termination under the president’s scheme.
“For some reason, this Court sees fit to step in now and release the President’s wrecking ball at the outset of this litigation,” Jackson wrote in her dissent. “In my view, this decision is not only truly unfortunate but also hubristic and senseless.”