Judge temporarily blocks Trump administration’s federal layoffs during shutdown

A federal judge ordered the administration on Wednesday to halt its firing of federal employees during the government shutdown, saying it was ill-conceived and executed.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, a Clinton appointee to the court in San Francisco, sided with two labor unions that represent federal workers, saying the attempt at a reduction in force was illegal.

She issued a restraining order telling the government to stop issuing new RIF notices and not to enforce notices already sent out at agencies where employees are represented by the two unions.

“It’s very much ready, fire, aim on most of these programs, and it has a human cost,” Judge Illston said during a hearing on the matter. “It’s a human cost that cannot be tolerated.”

She said President Trump and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought were wrongly taking advantage of the ongoing government shutdown, which entered its third week Wednesday.

Government lawyers had said the decisions were being made by the departments themselves.

But the labor unions — the American Federation of Government Employees and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — said the directions were coming from the White House, which was bent on political retribution against Democrats for their role in orchestrating the shutdown.

“These are largely people that the Democrats want. Many of them will be fired,” Mr. Trump said ahead of the layoffs.

The unions celebrated the ruling as a rebuke to Mr. Trump.

“The administration’s move to fire thousands of federal employees who are already going without pay during the government shutdown is not only cruel but unlawful,” said AFGE National President Everett Kelley.

The administration had already sent notices to nearly 4,000 employees, though it said it only intended firings of about 3,100 of them, spanning seven departments: Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Homeland Security and Treasury.

Nearly 800 employees at HHS were sent firing notices, but the department didn’t actually want them fired, an official told the judge in a filing Tuesday.

Mr. Vought said Wednesday that the eventual total of workers laid off during the shutdown could exceed 10,000.

“We want to be very aggressive where we can be in shuttering the bureaucracy, not just the funding,” Mr. Vought said on “The Charlie Kirk Show” that was broadcast live from the White House. “We now have an opportunity to do that, and that’s where we’re going to be looking for our opportunities.”

Meanwhile, the ongoing government shutdown is delaying the announcement of the annual Social Security cost-of-living adjustment for tens of millions of beneficiaries.

Originally scheduled for Wednesday, the 2024 Social Security COLA announcement will now be Oct. 24. It is timed to the September Consumer Price Index, which also has not yet been released.

Republicans have pushed to keep the government open at last year’s funding levels while all sides negotiate over full-year spending bills.

That proposal has cleared the House but has been blocked in the Senate by a Democratic filibuster.

Democrats want the spending bill to include $1.5 trillion in health care policies, including extending a pandemic-era Obamacare subsidy and unraveling Medicaid changes included in Mr. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill budget law from this summer.

• This story includes wire service reports.