The high court in an unsigned order granted the Justice Department’s request to stay an injunction issued by a judge in the U.S. District Court for Northern California. Image: Phil Pasquini/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffUpdated: The U.S. Supreme Court has issued a stay of a lower judge’s order that had required the Trump administration to stop the wide scale layoffs of probationary federal employees and to reinstate those fired at six major departments. Meanwhile on Wednesday, the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit lifted an injunction that had called for rehiring thousands of fired probationary employees at additional agencies.
The high court in an unsigned order granted the Justice Department’s request to stay an injunction issued by a judge in the U.S. District Court for Northern California involving Agriculture, Interior, Energy, Defense, Treasury and Veterans Affairs. Together, they had laid off an estimated more than 20,000 probationary employees, including some who had completed their initial probation and were serving a new probationary period after having been promoted.
In the wake of the district court’s ruling, and a similar one from a judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, agencies had been offering reinstatement to affected employees, in many cases putting those who accept—not all do—on paid administrative leave as an initial step.
The fallout of the high court’s order could take some time to settle out. The order involves only the Northern California case and the six agencies named in it. Now a similar move has been made against the Maryland case, which applies to the same six departments plus a dozen other departments and agencies, although the judge in that case had narrowed the injunction to protect only employees working in one of the states sponsoring that suit (Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin).
Separate from the court cases, the MSPB has ordered Agriculture to offer reinstatement to the 5,900 probationary employees it laid off.
In a statement, the AFGE union and a number of public interest groups that sponsored the case said, “There is no doubt that thousands of public service employees were unlawfully fired in an effort to cripple federal agencies and their crucial programs that serve millions of Americans every day. Today’s order by the U.S. Supreme Court is deeply disappointing but is only a momentary pause in our efforts to enforce the trial court’s orders and hold the federal government accountable.”
In issuing the injunction, the judge in the Northern California court had found that the boilerplate layoff notices that agencies used didn’t meet the requirements for firing even probationary employees and that the layoffs were effectively a RIF targeting only them, which did not comply with RIF laws and procedures.
Those issues were not before the Supreme Court; the question there was whether the injunction should remain in effect while legal proceedings continued in the lower courts. The Supreme Court’s order focused only on one of many aspects, the Justice Department’s argument that the interest groups did not have enough of a direct interest in the continued employment of federal employees to challenge layoffs.
“The District Court’s injunction was based solely on the allegations of the nine non-profit-organization plaintiffs in this case. But under established law, those allegations are presently insufficient to support the organizations’ standing,” it said. It added that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson would have denied the request for a stay on grounds that that question still was before the lower courts and Justice Sonia Sotomayor would have denied it outright.
Since the motion was filed at the high court, the district court judge has reversed his earlier ruling that the AFGE was limited to bringing its complaint through the FLRA process and has held that the union did have standing in his court.
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