Supreme Court backs Trump for now on fired probationary federal employees

(CNN) — The Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed the Trump administration to keep several thousand probationary federal employees it is attempting to fire off the payroll while lower courts weigh whether the downsizing efforts are legal, the latest in a series of wins for the White House at the conservative high court.

The Supreme Court’s decision blocks a ruling from a lower court judge that required the government to temporarily reinstate more than 16,000 probationary employees.

In a brief, two-paragraph order, the court said that the unions who filed the litigation didn’t have standing to sue. The decision didn’t address the merits of the arguments, and it is not the final word on whether the employees will be allowed to keep their jobs, but it will have a significant impact on both the workers and the agencies in the meantime.

Two liberal justices – Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson – publicly dissented. Jackson offered a brief explanation, questioning the need for the high court to enter into the case on an emergency basis.

The full implications of the ruling are not clear given that a federal judge in Maryland earlier this month issued a preliminary injunction that reinstated some of the employees not covered in the case before the Supreme Court.

Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said that the decision was a relatively limited one.

“All that the court said here is that the nonprofit organizations who obtained an injunction in San Francisco weren’t the right parties to challenge the mass firings,” he said. “It’s another win for Trump, but once again only with regard to who can and can’t sue, and in which courts. Other challenges to the mass firings have already resulted in rulings against the government in other cases, and those remain in place.”

Still, the decision was a win for the Trump administration, which had asked the high court to step into the case to toss out the lower court’s order. It came a day after the court also allowed the administration to continue deportations under the controversial Alien Enemies Act – though with some new limitations added.

In its effort to slash the size of the federal government, the Trump administration has targeted probationary workers because they have fewer job protections and can be dismissed more easily. While those employees generally cannot appeal their termination to the Merit Systems Protection Board, they may do so if the action stemmed from “partisan political reasons” or “marriage status.”

In the case at hand, labor unions and other groups had challenged the Office of Personnel Management’s role in the firings, which affected thousands of employees and sent shockwaves through various federal agencies, some of which later rehired some of the workers.

US District Judge William Alsup, nominated by President Bill Clinton, ordered the administration to “immediately” offer over 16,000 probationary employees their jobs back.

“Each agency had (and still has) discretion to hire and fire its own employees,” Alsup wrote in his opinion. “Here, the agencies were directed by OPM to fire all probationary employees, and they executed that directive. To staunch the irreparable harms to organizational plaintiffs caused by OPM unlawfully slashing other agency’s staff required immediately reinstating those employees.”

But Trump framed the case as another example of the federal judiciary stepping in to manage the decisions it says should be left to the executive branch.

“The district court’s extraordinarily overbroad remedy is now inflicting ongoing, irreparable harm on the Executive Branch that warrants this Court’s urgent intervention,” Sarah Harris, who was then the administration’s acting solicitor general, told the Supreme Court.

This story has been updated with additional details.

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