Washington — The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to halt a lower court order that required six federal agencies to rehire more than 16,000 probationary workers who had been fired.
The high court granted a request for emergency relief from the Trump administration, which sought to move forward with its efforts to drastically scale back the size of the federal government as legal proceedings continue. In an unsigned order, the Supreme Court said the injunction issued by the district court in mid-March “was based solely on the allegations of the nine non-profit-organization plaintiffs in this case. But under established law, those allegations are presently insufficient to support the organizations'” legal right to sue, a concept known as standing.
Its stay will remain in place will litigation plays out. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson said they would have denied the Justice Department’s request for relief.
Probationary workers, generally those who were still in one or two-year trial periods, were the early targets of mass firings that are part of President Trump’s government-cutting initiative. Many have been left in limbo since mid-February, when they were fired and then had their employment restored weeks later as a result of court orders.
The dispute before the Supreme Court arose after thousands of probationary workers received notices that they had been terminated. The letters, many of which used similar language, based the firings on individual performance, though federal workers argued in court filings that they had received positive performance reviews.
In response to the firings, a group of labor unions and nonprofit organizations filed a lawsuit in federal district court in California. The lawsuit claimed that the Office of Personnel Management directed the mass terminations of probationary workers, acting outside of its authority.
In late February, U.S. District Judge William Alsup issued a temporary restraining order deeming earlier guidance from OPM to federal agencies about the firing of probationary workers “illegal” and invalid. The judge also concluded that the mass firings were likely unlawful.
On the heels of that decision, OPM acting director Charles Ezell issued revised guidance clarifying that it is “not directing agencies to take any specific performance-based actions regarding probationary employees.”
Following a hearing last month, the judge ordered six agencies — the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior, Treasury and Veterans Affair — to immediately offer reinstatement to all probationary workers who were fired the previous month.
Human resources officials at the half-a-dozen agencies told the court that they had rehired the fired employees and placed them on administrative leave before returning them to full-duty status.
The Justice Department asked a federal appeals court to pause that decision while it appealed, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit declined the request.
In an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court, acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris argued that the district judge did not have the power to grant reinstatement to thousands of probationary workers, and refuted that OPM had directed the firings in the first place.
“An order directing reinstatement of thousands of employees across six agencies is intolerable,” she wrote in a filing. “The injunction appears to prevent the agencies from terminating the employees based on an exercise of the agencies’ independent judgment — and would even seem to prevent the employees’ termination based on newly arising grounds like new instances of poor performance or misconduct without, at a minimum, obtaining permission from the district court.”
The acting solicitor general, who represents the government before the Supreme Court, told the justices that Alsup’s order is a “profound invasion” of the executive branch’s ability to direct its internal affairs.
She also warned that the reinstatements have posed logistical burdens that require significant resources, and said that the obligation to pay the fired probationary employees “inflicts massive financial costs” that cannot be recovered.
“Each day the preliminary injunction remains in effect subjects the Executive Branch to judicial micromanagement of its day-to-day operations,” Harris wrote.
But the unions and organizations challenging the firings said that the harms alleged by the government are 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 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,” lawyers for the challengers wrote in a filing.
They called OPM’s directives “hasty and sloppy,” and said that the government can still fire employees, as long as it complies with the law.
“The district court’s reinstatement merely orders the government to return to the situation that existed before it embarked on illegal mass termination of probationary employees,” the legal team for the unions and nonprofits wrote. “If there are ‘practical burdens’ associated with the return to the status quo, they are of the government’s own making.”
The case brought by the unions and groups is one of two challenging the mass firings of probationary workers. A group of 19 states filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Maryland arguing the terminations were unlawful, and in March, a judge ordered affected probationary workers at more than a dozen agencies be reinstated.
The judge then granted a preliminary injunction in early April, which applies to probationary workers at 20 agencies who live or work in the states involved in the lawsuit.
