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Nonprofits that challenged mass firings didn’t have standing, Supreme Court says while staying rehiring order

homesafetytechpros — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 07:10:14 +0000

U.S. Supreme Court

Nonprofits that challenged mass firings didn’t have standing, Supreme Court says while staying rehiring order

April 8, 2025, 1:31 pm CDT

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday stayed a federal judge’s preliminary injunction that required the federal government to rehire as many as 16,000 fired probationary employees. (Image from Shutterstock)

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday stayed a federal judge’s preliminary injunction that required the federal government to rehire as many as 16,000 fired probationary employees.

In its April 8 order, the Supreme Court said the injunction entered by Senior U.S. District Judge William H. Alsup of the Northern District of California was based solely on claims by nine nonprofit plaintiffs. But those groups did not have standing, the Supreme Court said.

The injunction was not based on claims by other plaintiffs in the lawsuit before Alsup. Alsup didn’t rule on claims by the labor union plaintiffs because he found that he probably didn’t have the power to hear them, according to SCOTUSblog.

The Supreme Court stay will remain in place throughout the litigation.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.

SCOTUSblog, the Washington Post, the New York Times and Politico are among the publications with coverage.

According to Politico, “the decision’s ultimate impact is murky because another federal judge has issued a separate order reinstating many of the same probationary workers.”

Alsup had granted the preliminary injunction in a March 13 ruling from the bench, he said in a March 14 memorandum opinion. He ordered the employees’ reinstatement based on a finding that the Office of Personnel Management had no authority to fire employees of another agency. That authority belongs to each agency, he said.

Alsup’s injunction reinstated probationary workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense and the Department of the Treasury, according to a March 13 press release.

The government has contended that the firings can only be contested by individual employees before the Merit Systems Protection Board.

The case is Office of Personnel Management v. American Federation of Government Employees.

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Judge rips Trump admin’s ‘illegal scheme’ of mass firings

homesafetytechpros — Sat, 15 Mar 2025 02:29:05 +0000

Donald Trump at Manhattan Criminal Court, Thursday, May 30, 2024, in New York (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, Pool).

A federal judge in Maryland on Thursday evening ordered the Trump administration to rehire tens of thousands of recently terminated federal workers and issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting additional unlawful mass firings, becoming the second judge to issue such an order in the same day.

The sweeping 56-page ruling from Maryland-based U.S. District Judge James Bredar covers firings across 18 different agencies, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Department of Education, and Homeland Security. Bredar reasoned that the administration’s actions appeared to be an attempt to skirt statutory constraints regarding “reductions in force” (RIFs) by falsely claiming that each of the thousands of workers were fired for “performance or other individualized reason.”

“In this case, the government conducted massive layoffs, but it gave no advance notice,” the judge wrote. “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. There were no individualized assessments of employees. They were all just fired. Collectively. Accordingly, in the language of relevant laws, these big government layoffs were actually ‘Reductions in Force,’ or ‘RIFs.’ And, because these were ‘RIFs,’ they had to be preceded by notice to the states that would be impacted.”

The ruling came as the result of a lawsuit filed by 19 Democratic state attorneys general and Washington, D.C., which alleged that the Trump administration failed to follow procedures mandated by the Administrative Procedures Act for “reductions in force,” which require giving employees at least 60 days notice of mass terminations. Without such notice, the plaintiff States were not prepared for the impact resulting from the deluge of about 24,000 people being suddenly added their unemployed populations, Bredar said.

The ruling is yet another impediment to the Trump administration’s effort to gut the federal workforce at breakneck speed.

The Department of Justice had previously argued that the states did not have standing to sue over the allegedly unlawful terminations, asserting that they were unaffected third parties whose claims were based on theoretical “downstream harm.” The DOJ further claimed that the administration had the discretion to fire the employees and that the firings did not constitute a RIF because they only terminated probationary employees, which are typically workers who’ve been hired or promoted to a new position within the last year.

Probationary workers can be terminated pursuant to a lawful RIF, for performance-related reasons, or conditions related to their previous employment. But the government did not go about the firings in any of the permitted ways, Bredar said.

“Here, the terminated probationary employees were plainly not terminated for cause,” the judge wrote. “The sheer number of employees that were terminated in a matter of days belies any argument that these terminations were due to the employees’ individual unsatisfactory performance or conduct. As Plaintiffs allege, the Government has terminated at least 24,000 probationary employees. It is simply not conceivable that the Government could have conducted individualized assessments of the relevant employees in the relevant timeframe.”

He added, “The Government’s contention to the contrary borders on the frivolous.”

Bredar noted that his stay on the firings and order to reinstate workers would be a large burden for the government. However, he emphasized that such a burden was a problem of the Trump administration’s own making.

“When, as is likely the case here, the Government has engaged in an illegal scheme spanning broad swaths of the federal workforce, it is inevitable that the remediation of that scheme will itself be a significant task,” he wrote.

Earlier in the day, California-based District Judge William Alsup similarly tore into the Trump administration for its “unlawful” firing of tens of thousands of probationary employees over the past month and a half, calling it a “sad day” when the government would terminate “good” workers supposedly on the basis of performance — knowing “good and well that’s a lie.” He subsequently ordered the agencies to “immediately” rehire those who had been booted.

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OPM director must testify in Trump mass firings case: Judge

homesafetytechpros — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 16:47:48 +0000

President Donald Trump at a press conference at the White House in Washington on Feb. 27, 2025 (Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Sipa USA; via AP Images)

A federal judge in California has ordered the Trump administration to produce Charles Ezell, the acting director of the Office of Personnel and Management, for testimony in the ongoing OPM mass firings case, just days after the Justice Department allegedly claimed Ezell wouldn’t be made available to testify — or face his wrath in court.

“If Ezell does not appear in violation of that order, then the Court will have to decide the sanction, including whether or not to strike or limit his sworn declaration,” warned U.S. District Judge William Alsup in a Monday order.

Ezell, appointed by Trump to be acting director after he took office in January, is accused of unlawfully firing thousands of government workers still in the probationary period of their employment. The judge had previously ordered Ezell to appear in court on Thursday to testify, but the plaintiffs suing the OPM — five labor unions and five nonprofit organizations — said in court filings last week that they believed DOJ’s Civil Division was not going to let Ezell take the stand. On Monday, those fears came to fruition as DOJ lawyers filed a motion to vacate the upcoming evidentiary hearing and preclude Ezell’s testimony.

Alsup said in his ruling that he sided against the request to have Ezell skate testimony because he had already submitted a sworn declaration supporting the defendants’ position. The government argued in its motion that “the March 13 evidentiary hearing and any depositions are unnecessary in light of OPM’s compliance with the TRO and [their] willingness to convert the Court’s TRO into a preliminary injunction.” But Alsup, a Bill Clinton appointee, pointed out how things have changed since he first granted a temporary restraining order (TRO) last month halting any additional firings.

“The problem is that plaintiffs seek broader relief than was provided by the TRO now in place,” the judge explained. “So, even if the Court must rule based solely on the record submitted during the TRO proceeding, it will do so, on or shortly after the March 13 hearing.”

In their Monday motion, DOJ lawyers urged the court to let Ezell avoid testifying because doing so would “inappropriately intrude on the workings of a coordinate branch of government and pose avoidable and unnecessary separation-of-powers concerns.” Alsup said he felt this argument fell short, too.

“The problem here is that Acting Director Ezell submitted a sworn declaration in support of defendants’ position, but now refuses to appear to be cross examined, or to be deposed (despite, it should be added, government counsel’s embrace of that very idea during the TRO hearing),” the judge said.

The mass firings case was brought forward last month by the labor unions and nonprofit organizations, which filed a 34-page complaint accusing Ezell of ordering federal agencies across the country to terminate thousands of employees “by sending them standardized notices of termination, drafted by OPM, that falsely state that the terminations are for performance reasons.” Plaintiffs argue that Congress, not OPM, is what controls federal employment and that the legislature had already determined that each agency is responsible for managing and terminating employees.

“OPM lacks the constitutional, statutory, or regulatory authority to order federal agencies to terminate employees in this fashion that Congress has authorized those agencies to hire and manage, and certainly has no authority to require agencies to perpetrate a massive fraud on the federal workforce by lying about federal workers’ ‘performance,’ to detriment of those workers, their families, and all those in the public and private sectors who rely upon those workers for important services,” the complaint states.

On Monday, DOJ lawyers claimed it was “good cause” that ultimately supported their request to vacate the evidentiary hearing and stop Ezell from testifying.

“OPM has already substantially complied with the Court’s TRO by promptly updating its guidance to agencies, thus obviating the necessity (or at minimum reducing the value) of any evidentiary hearing, and thereby also eliminating the need for the discovery Plaintiffs seek in connection with that hearing,” the DOJ said in its motion. “At the same time, Defendants’ willingness to stipulate to conversion of the TRO into a preliminary injunction further eliminates any need for or benefit from such a hearing — and, at minimum, eliminates any need to proceed on a highly expedited timetable.”

A Texas native who lived in Georgia before moving to Washington to work for Trump, Ezell is described in recent articles by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the evangelical news outlet byFaith as a data analytics expert who previously worked for OPM as a “lead data architect” and “branch chief” for its data and analytics department. It’s unclear how he came across Trump’s radar, according to the Journal-Constitution, with even Ezell himself being surprised by the job offer.

“A few months ago, I got a call from one of the president’s advisors. I assumed it was a headhunter trying to recruit me back to the private sector which happens somewhat regularly,” Ezell told byFaith. “I took the call which led to a series of meetings with representatives from the president’s administration. All the sudden, I was offered the opportunity to serve as the acting director of OPM. I humbly accepted the opportunity to serve America and the president in this way.”

Jerry Lambe contributed to this report.

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