Judge halts Trump’s planned layoffs of federal workers during government shutdown, calling them unlawful

By Devan Cole, Tami Luhby, CNN

(CNN) — A federal judge in San Francisco has ordered the Trump administration to immediately halt its efforts to lay off roughly 4,100 federal workers during the government shutdown, saying the move is unlawful.

US District Judge Susan Illston said during a hearing Wednesday that she was granting a request from unions representing federal workers for an emergency order pausing the layoffs that began last Friday.

“As of right now, the (temporary restraining order) is in effect,” Illston said. The order, the judge said, bars the administration for now from moving ahead with any layoffs for members of several unions that sued over the plans, or issuing any new layoff notices for those unions’ members. It will remain in effect while the unions’ legal challenge plays out.

The unions, which sued the administration late last month after officials said they would lay off workers amid the shutdown, have argued that the government is unlawfully using the lapse in funding as justification for the layoffs.

Illston, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, said she saw evidence suggesting the administration had “taken advantage of the lapse in government spending, in government functioning, to assume that that all bets are off, that the laws don’t apply to them anymore.”

She went on to say that she believed the planned layoffs were impermissible, in part, because they’re “politically motivated,” and pointed to statements by President Donald Trump that officials were targeting programs and agencies favored by Democrats.

“The politics that infuses what’s going on is being trumpeted out loud in this case,” the judge said.

“And there are laws which govern how we can do the things we do. Including laws which govern how we do (reductions in force),” she added. “And the activities being undertaken here are contrary to the laws.”

The Trump administration on Friday started issuing reduction in force, or RIF, notices to roughly 4,100 employees at multiple agencies, after issuing a memo in late September telling agencies to prepare for mass layoffs if the government shut down. The shutdown began on October 1.

The White House has said it wants to implement further layoffs. Before the ruling was issued on Wednesday, Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought said that layoffs will likely reach “north of 10,000.”

“We’re definitely talking thousands of people. Much of the reporting has been based on kind of court snapshots, which they’ve articulated is in the 4,000 number of people. But that’s just a snapshot, and I think it’ll get much higher,” Vought said Wednesday on “The Charlie Kirk Show.”

“It could grow higher,” Vought later added. “I think we’ll probably end up being north of 10,000.”

“We want to be very aggressive where we can be in shuttering the bureaucracy — not just the funding,” Vought said. “We now have an opportunity to do that, and that’s where we’re going to be looking for our opportunities.”

The RIF process, however, has been chaotic, with hundreds of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention employees mistakenly receiving notices Friday evening that they were being let go.

An updated court filing on Tuesday confirmed that about 1,760 employees at the Department of Health and Human Services, of which the CDC is a part, were sent RIF notices instead of the 982 staffers who were supposed to get them. The agency, which is rescinding the incorrect notices, blamed “data discrepancies and processing errors.”

In addition to HHS, RIF notices were sent to several thousand workers at the departments of Commerce, Education, Housing and Urban Development, Homeland Security and Treasury, according to Tuesday’s court filing.

Also, nearly 200 staffers at the Department of Energy were issued a general RIF notice informing them they may be subject to layoffs in the future.

And more than two dozen employees at the Environmental Protection Agency received “intent to RIF” notices, though the EPA has not made a final decision on whether those workers will be let go.

CNN’s Kit Maher contributed to this report.

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