With mass rehirings ordered and a plea to the Supreme Court, Trump’s court fights scale to new heights

The scale of the Trump administration’s legal battles continued to expand this week, with a federal judge ordering the government to rehire potentially thousands of probationary workers and the administration turning to the Supreme Court to combat the large number of nationwide injunctions slowing its agenda.

The orders by U.S. District Judges William Alsup and James Bredar on Thursday were among the largest-scale rulings against the administration to date out of the more than 100 lawsuits it’s facing as a result of its efforts to reshape the government. The orders give at least a temporary reprieve to tens of thousands of fired workers.

The administration, meanwhile, has clearly grown frustrated with the repeated intervention from the courts. It went to the Supreme Court on Wednesday to challenge three nationwide orders barring President Donald Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship from being implemented — and asking the court to “declare that enough is enough” when it comes to such orders.

Here’s a look at the biggest legal developments of the past week.

You’re rehired

In a pair of rulings Thursday, judges in California and Maryland found the administration acted unlawfully when it directed mass layoffs of an unspecified number of the federal government’s roughly 200,000 probationary workers — workers who were either recently hired or promoted to new positions. The government has not released the total number of employees who were laid off, but a coalition of states that sued over the firings in Maryland estimated it to be roughly 24,000 people.

In the more wide-ranging of the orders, the Maryland judge, James Bredar, said the government “must follow certain rules” when it conducts mass layoffs.

“In this case, the government conducted massive layoffs, but it gave no advanced notice. It claims it wasn’t required to because, it says, it dismissed each one of these thousands of probationary employees for ‘performance’ or other individualized reasons. On the record before the Court, this isn’t true,” Bredar wrote. “They were all just fired. Collectively.”

He ordered the actions removing them be stayed for at least 14 days while he weighs a longer-term preliminary injunction, and directed the employees be reinstated by Monday at 1 p.m. ET.

Bredar’s written order came hours after U.S. District Judge William Alsup issued a verbal order that probationary employees at six federal departments — Veterans Affairs, Defense, Energy, Interior, Agriculture and Treasury — should get their jobs back until the government follows proper procedures. He noted the February layoffs came immediately after directives from the Office of Personnel Management to fire probationary employees.

A template letter the Office of Personnel Management sent the agencies said the workers should be told, “The Agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest.” Despite that language, evidence in the case showed that many of the fired employees had received glowing work evaluations.

“It is sad, a sad day when our government would fire some good employee, and say it was based on performance, when they know good and well, that’s a lie,” Alsup said, calling the move a “gimmick” and “a sham in order to try to avoid statutory requirements.”

“It also happens to be that whenever you fire somebody based on performance, then they can’t get unemployment insurance. So that makes it even worse, doesn’t it? And then it makes it even worse because the next employer is going to say, ‘Well, have you ever been terminated based on performance?’ They’re going to have to say, ‘Yes,'” the judge added.

His ruling is likely only a temporary reprieve for at least some of the workers. He said at the hearing that there is nothing wrong with reductions in force “if it’s done correctly under the law.”

The Justice Department filed a notice of appeal on Alsup’s ruling on Thursday night and is likely to try to appeal Bredar’s ruling as well.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt blasted the judges as “judicial activists” on Friday, and said their actions were “unconstitutional.”

“You cannot have a low-level district court judge filing an injunction to usurp the executive authority of the president of the United States. That is completely absurd,” she said.

Seeking help from the Supreme Court

While the administration has had a number of wins in court, it has also been hit with a number of nationwide injunctions, including orders halting a federal funding freeze and another blocking it from cutting off grants to organizations with diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

The Justice Department went to the Supreme Court on Thursday in a case aimed at limiting so-called “universal” injunctions in the future.

The petition cited three nationwide injunctions barring the administration from taking action on Trump’s executive order aimed at limiting birthright citizenship, and asked the high court to narrow the scope of the injunctions, potentially just to the people who live in the Democratic-led states that challenged it.

In her filing, acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris wrote that judges did not have the authority to order such broad relief, and that those types of injunctions “compromise the executive branch’s ability to carry out its functions.” 

“This court should declare that enough is enough before district courts’ burgeoning reliance on universal injunctions becomes further entrenched,” she argued.

The judges in the birthright citizenship cases and the judge in the DEI case all found that it would likely be unconstitutional for the government to follow through on the Trump executive orders, so a nationwide ban was necessary.