Judge indefinitely halts shutdown layoffs, noting human toll

A federal judge in San Francisco has indefinitely halted the Trump administration's mass layoffs of federal employees tied to the government shutdown.

The decision came almost two weeks after U.S. District Judge Susan Illston temporarily paused thousands of layoffs, known as RIFs, or reductions in force, at agencies where the federal employee unions that brought the lawsuit, including the American Federation of Government Employees, have members or bargaining units.

In court Tuesday, an attorney representing the Trump administration pushed back, asserting that the executive branch can conduct RIFs before, during or after a lapse in Congressional appropriations to achieve the president's policy priorities — and that it's good policy to do so.

"If you don't have money coming in, you should be looking for ways to cut costs," argued Michael Velchik, an attorney with the Justice Department.

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The plaintiffs' attorney, Danielle Leonard, countered that a lapse in appropriations is not the same thing as an elimination of statutory authority and that the government cannot simply tell agencies they no longer need to comply with Congressional mandates. She further argued the government had violated federal law by ordering employees to work on RIFs during the shutdown.

In the days since Illston first issued her temporary restraining order, the two sides have haggled over its scope. The Trump administration initially determined it did not apply to most of the roughly 4,000 federal employees who have received layoff notices since the government shutdown began Oct. 1, including those working for the Treasury Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Illston later modified the order, including by broadening it to cover six additional unions.

On Tuesday, Illston said she believed the unions were likely to prove the Trump administration's actions were unlawful, but she appeared to pull back slightly on the scope of her order. She said she would hold another hearing to determine whether some of the RIFs announced since the shutdown began, including at the Interior Department and the Education Department, were in fact related to the lapse in appropriations.

Whatever comes of President Donald Trump's latest attempts to slash the federal workforce, it's clear the administration's modus operandi — taking sweeping and legally questionable actions to swiftly eliminate jobs — is taking a toll on workers, a point Illston underscored in court Tuesday.

In her opening remarks, Illston read from several of the declarations submitted by employees who have received layoff notices since Oct. 1, including an Air Force veteran and longtime federal employee who wrote that she had never gone through anything as traumatizing as what she's going through now — including during her combat deployment.

"Human lives are being dramatically affected by the activities we're discussing," Illston said.

For many of those receiving layoff notices amid the shutdown, it's not the first time the Trump administration has tried to fire them.

In one testimony filed with the court, Mayra Medrano, a program analyst with the Commerce Department's Minority Business Development Agency and a member of the National Federation of Federal Employees, wrote that she first received an RIF notice in April with an effective termination date of May 9 before being reinstated by court order in June.

"The constant threat of being fired, which has persisted for months, has caused me tremendous physical and mental distress," she wrote, elaborating that she experienced a severe stress-induced seizure while on administrative leave this spring.

She wrote that she now feels as if she's reliving that nightmare.

"Receiving an RIF notice during the government shutdown, on top of the previous RIF, has been traumatic and it will have a lasting impact on my health," she wrote. "It doesn't feel as though the administration thought about or cared about that long-lasting impact."

Medrano did not respond to NPR's request for further comment.

In the initial hearing in the case two weeks ago, the plaintiffs' attorney Leonard pointed to comments made by White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought before Trump's re-election.

In a private speech in 2023 surfaced by ProPublica, Vought, who is now largely seen as the force behind the shutdown layoffs, said he wanted government bureaucrats to be "traumatically affected" to the point of not wanting to go to work.

"That's exactly what they are doing," Leonard told the court.

In an interview with The Charlie Kirk Show before Illston blocked the layoffs, Vought said more than 10,000 people could receive RIF notices during the shutdown.

Still, that amounts to only a fraction of the federal employees who have been fired since Trump returned to the White House in January.

Back in August, Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor said roughly 300,000 federal workers would be gone from the government by the end of the year, noting that 80% of those departures were voluntary.

That means even prior to the shutdown, roughly 60,000 federal workers faced involuntary separation, according to Kupor's estimates.

Another 154,000 workers took the Trump administration's "Fork in the Road" buyout offer, according to OPM. Many who took the buyout told NPR they feared they would be fired if they didn't leave.

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