The Trump administration asked the SC on Monday to block a ruling from a federal judge in California ordering it to rehire thousands of fired federal workers who had been on probationary status.
Sarah M Harris, the acting solicitor general, wrote that federal judges have issued 40+ temporary restraining orders or injunctions blocking administration programmes. She said federal judges had issued 14 such injunctions against the federal govt in the first three years of the Biden administration.
The emergency application filed Monday objected to an injunction from a federal judge in California who earlier this month ordered the administration to reinstate 16,000+ probationary employees who had been fired. Harris wrote that the ruling was a stark example of this trend. “The court’s extraordinary reinstatement order violates the separation of powers, arrogating to a single district court the executive branch’s powers of personnel management on the flimsiest of grounds and the hastiest of timelines,” she wrote. “That is no way to run a govt. This court should stop the ongoing assault on the constitutional structure before further damage is wrought.”
In issuing a preliminary injunction, Judge William H Alsup acknowledged that “each federal agency has the statutory authority to hire and fire its employees…” But he wrote that the agency that he said had coordinated the terminations, the office of personnel management had no authority to do so in other agencies. “Yet that is what happened here – en masse,” he wrote. His reinstatement order applied to probationary workers fired from Pentagon, treasury, and agriculture, energy, veterans affairs and interior departments.
