The Trump administration is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to allow it to continue with its plan to fire thousands of federal workers in an effort to stop waste, fraud, and abuse after a federal district judge issued an injunction stopping Trump from doing one of the primary things he was elected to do.
Monday’s appeal to the nation’s high court comes after U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton serving in California, issued a ruling last week essentially saying the president doesn’t have the authority to exercise basic executive functions, like firing unnecessary or incompetent employees in the executive branch, without first obtaining congressional approval.
Illston’s opinion halted a reduction-in-force (RIF) pursued by the Trump administration to thin out the bloated federal bureaucracy, which is already a statutorily approved action — but Illston cannot seem to be bothered with that inconvenient fact.
“That injunction rests on the indefensible premise that the President needs explicit statutory authorization from Congress to exercise his core Article II authority to superintend the internal personnel decisions of the Executive Branch,” the Trump administration filing states. “Controlling the personnel of federal agencies lies at the heartland of this authority. The Constitution does not erect a presumption against presidential control of agency staffing, and the President does not need special permission from Congress to exercise core Article II powers.”
Illston’s opinion, clearly written in an indignant tone on behalf of the unions and advocacy groups that sued the Trump administration, attempted to wish into existence that a large-scale RIF is tantamount to a fundamental reorganization of an agency itself, and would therefore require congressional approval for making staffing decisions.
“Agencies may not conduct large-scale reorganizations and reductions in force in blatant disregard of Congress’s mandates, and a President may not initiate large-scale executive branch reorganization without partnering with Congress,” she wrote, in an opinion George Washington Law School professor Jonathan Turley called “what some believe is one of the greatest intrusions into Article II authority.”
The Trump administration’s Monday filing, which seeks for the Supreme Court to enjoin Illston’s order, said it “interferes with the Executive Branch’s internal operations and unquestioned legal authority to plan and carry out RIFs, and does so on a government-wide scale.”
“More concretely, the injunction has brought to a halt numerous in-progress RIFs at more than a dozen federal agencies, sowing confusion about what RIF-related steps agencies may take and compelling the government to retain — at taxpayer expense — thousands of employees whose continuance in federal service the agencies deem not to be in the government and public interest,” the filing added.
In 2020, the Supreme Court was unambiguous about executive authority, deciding, that the president has the ability to remove lesser executive officers and that Congress cannot restrict the president’s power to do so in all but two circumstances, noting, “[t]he entire ‘executive power’ belongs to the President alone,” that “the Constitution assumes that lesser executive officers will ‘assist the supreme Magistrate in discharging the duties of his trust,'” and that the president has “‘the power of appointing, overseeing, and controlling those who execute the laws.’”
The RIFs were initiated by a Feb. 11 executive order with the goal of reducing the size of federal government — one major initiative promised by Trump on the campaign trail.
Despite Illston’s exasperated complaint that “in their view, federal agencies are not reorganizing. Rather, they have simply initiated reductions in force according to established regulations and ‘consistent with applicable law.’ The Court and the bystanding public should just move along,” the order took steps to ensure that any “subcomponents” that are “statutorily required” not be eliminated.
While the judge’s language suggests that the Trump administration is attempting to pull the wool over the eyes of the American people and fundamentally alter statutory authority, the order actually stated that “[a]gencies should review their statutory authority and ensure that their plans and actions are consistent with such authority.”
This is not the first time the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to intervene in this case, but it was initially denied. Afterwards, the administration appealed to the Ninth Circuit, which upheld Illston’s ruling in a divided decision.
The Trump administration is seeking relief from the Supreme Court on an emergency basis. The Supreme Court asked the unions and special interests for a response to the Trump administration’s appeal by June 9.