Trump administration asks Supreme Court to block ruling reinstating thousands of fired probationary federal employees

(CNN) — The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Monday to put on hold a federal judge’s ruling reinstating thousands of probationary federal employees who were fired as part of the government’s efforts to quickly downsize its workforce.

The emergency appeal is the administration’s latest attempt to get the nation’s highest court to intervene on its behalf as lower courts frustrate – even on a temporary basis – key parts of President Donald Trump’s second term agenda.

In the case at hand, a federal judge in San Francisco issued a preliminary injunction earlier this month that required half a dozen federal agencies to “immediately” offer over 16,000 probationary employees their jobs back.

“The district court’s extraordinarily overbroad remedy is now inflicting ongoing, irreparable harm on the Executive Branch that warrants this Court’s urgent intervention,” acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris wrote in court papers.

Harris went on to say that the ruling from US District Judge William Alsup “has compelled the government to embark on the massive administrative undertaking of reinstating, and onboarding to full duty status, thousands of terminated employees in the span of a few days.”

The administration’s request comes as the federal appeals court based in San Francisco is considering a similar emergency appeal from the administration. That appeal was filed on March 14.

“Every additional day the injunction remains in effect is a day that six executive agencies are effectively under the district court’s receivership, necessitating immediate relief from this Court,” Harris argued.

Alsup’s ruling was one of the rare wins for federal labor groups challenging the administration’s efforts to cull its workforce. Though other federal judges declined to stop a wave of firings in the opening weeks of Trump’s second term, Alsup said he was making his decision because he believed the Office of Personnel Management unlawfully directed the agencies earlier this year to lay off the probationary employees, who generally have been on the job for less than a year.

“Each agency had (and still has) discretion to hire and fire its own employees. 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,” Alsup, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, wrote in his ruling.

The ruling came in a case brought by labor unions and others challenging OPM’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.

The Trump administration has been targeting probationary workers because they have fewer job protections and can be dismissed more easily. While they generally cannot appeal their termination to the Merit Systems Protection Board, they can if the action stemmed from “partisan political reasons” or “marriage status.”

Harris told the high court that “some” of the fired probationary employees have filed complaints with the Office of Special Counsel and argued that Alsup’s ruling ran headfirst into the administrative avenues set up by Congress to address such terminations.

“Declaring open season on challenges to federal personnel management is especially unsound because Congress has created an entirely different framework for resolving legal challenges to the terminations of federal employees,” she wrote, adding that allowing the unions “to head straight to district court and raise claims that the affected federal employees themselves cannot raise would upend that entire process.”

Norm Eisen, representing the plaintiffs as part of the State Democracy Defenders Fund, said the court will uphold Alsup’s ruling.

“The Trump administration illegally terminated tens of thousands of federal employees, as duly noted by Judge Alsup,” Eisen said in a statement. “The administration’s efforts to block relief have so far failed and now they are turning to the Supreme Court – baselessly.”

This story has been updated with additional comment.

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