A federal judge ordered the administration Wednesday to halt its firing of federal employees during the government shutdown, saying it was ill-conceived and executed.
U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, a Clinton appointee to the court in San Francisco, sided with two labor unions that represent federal workers, saying the attempted reduction in force was illegal.
She issued a restraining order telling the government to stop issuing reduction-in-force notices and not to enforce notices already sent from agencies where either of the unions represents employees.
“It’s very much ready, fire, aim on most of these programs, and it has a human cost,” Judge Illston said during a hearing. “It’s a human cost that cannot be tolerated.”
She said President Trump and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought were wrongly taking advantage of the government shutdown, which entered its third week Wednesday.
Government attorneys had said the departments were making the decisions.
SEE ALSO: OMB’s Vought says 10,000 layoffs might come during shutdown
The American Federation of Government Employees and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees said the directions came from the White House. They said the White House was bent on political retribution against Democrats for their role in orchestrating the shutdown.
“These are largely people that the Democrats want. Many of them will be fired,” Mr. Trump said before the layoffs.
The lawsuit was filed Sept. 30, a day before the shutdown, based on those kinds of comments and on an OMB memo prodding departments to seek layoffs amid the shutdown.
The unions celebrated the ruling as a rebuke to Mr. Trump.
“The administration’s move to fire thousands of federal employees who are already going without pay during the government shutdown is not only cruel but unlawful,” said AFGE National President Everett Kelley.
The administration had sent notices to nearly 4,000 employees, though it said it intended to fire only about 3,100. The employees were in seven departments: Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Homeland Security and Treasury.
Nearly 800 HHS employees were sent notices, but the department didn’t want them fired, an official told the judge in a filing Tuesday.
He blamed “data discrepancies and processing errors.”
The administration said some employees were returned to work to carry out the firings.
Judge Illston has ordered the government to provide updates by Friday on the number of notices sent.
Mr. Vought said the total of workers laid off during the shutdown could exceed 10,000.
“We want to be very aggressive where we can be in shuttering the bureaucracy, not just the funding,” Mr. Vought said on “The Charlie Kirk Show,” broadcast live from the White House. “We now have an opportunity to do that, and that’s where we’re going to be looking for our opportunities.”
The firings are part of a tumultuous downsizing of the federal bureaucracy that Mr. Trump started on his first day in office.
Lower court judges such as Judge Illston have largely been skeptical of the president’s powers, though higher courts have allowed some firings and buyouts to move forward.
In Washington, the government shutdown is delaying the annual Social Security cost-of-living adjustment announcement for tens of millions of beneficiaries.
The 2024 Social Security COLA announcement, originally scheduled for Wednesday, will now be Oct. 24. It is timed to the September consumer price index, which has not yet been released.
Republicans have pushed to keep the government open at last year’s funding levels while all sides negotiate over full-year spending bills.
That proposal has cleared the House but has been blocked in the Senate by a Democratic filibuster.
Democrats want the spending bill to include $1.5 trillion in health care policies, including an extension of a pandemic subsidy for Obamacare and an unraveling of Medicaid changes included in Mr. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill Act.
In his interview Wednesday, Mr. Vought signaled that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could be shuttered in two or three months.
“We don’t have anyone working there except our Republican appointees and a few careers that are doing statutory responsibilities while we close down the agency,” he said.
He acknowledged that the CFPB mission is important but said the agency “wasn’t doing it.”
“All they want to do is weaponize the tools of financial laws against basically small mom-and-pop lenders and other small financial institutions,” he said.
• This article is based in part on wire service reports.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
• Mallory Wilson can be reached at mwilson@washingtontimes.com.
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