Supreme Court Normalizes Trump’s Unprecedented Mass Firings

It’s now become the expectation that when cases involving presidential power grabs by Donald Trump reach the U.S. Supreme Court, he has a fast friend in the conservative majority, who are willing to bend over backwards to justify his wildly expansive views of executive authority. This week, we had a new confirmation of this relationship between a rogue chief executive and his black-robed cheerleaders as the U.S. Supreme Court swept aside a lower-court ruling slowing down the administration’s efforts to implement mass firings of federal employees with zero regard for congressional prerogatives and no real justification other than a general disregard for the public sector.

It all goes back to a February executive order that was issued just as Elon Musk’s DOGE was intensifying its destructive raids on federal agencies. It authorized a government-wide effort to implement reductions in force, a tool used occasionally to pare federal payrolls in an orderly fashion when agencies are being reorganized or funding is deeply cut. There hasn’t been anything orderly about the RIF plans we’ve seen so far; for the most part, under the whip of OMB director Russell Vought, agencies are continuing DOGE’s meat-ax approach to personnel savings. Federal judges — most notably California-based U.S. District Court Judge Susan Illston — have put a temporary hold on many RIFs pending legal review of their justifications and how they are actually being carried out.

The Trump administration challenged Illston’s “hold” on mass firings, failed to get it overturned by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and finally got relief from the Supreme Court in an unsigned order, as SCOTUSblog’s Amy Howe explained:

Nearly a month after briefing in the case was complete, the court granted — in a two-paragraph opinion — the government’s request. Illston’s ruling rested on the premise that the executive order and the OMB/OPM memorandum were illegal, the majority explained. But because the government is in fact likely correct that the executive order and memorandum are legal, the majority continued, and the other criteria that courts consider in determining whether to grant temporarily relief are also satisfied, Illston’s order should be put on hold while the government’s appeal moves forward in the 9th Circuit and, if necessary, the Supreme Court. 

The Supreme Court was not, the majority emphasized, weighing in on whether any particular RIF approved under the executive order and memorandum was itself legal. “Those plans,” the majority wrote, “are not before this Court.”

It’s unclear how many federal employees are affected, since, as the New York Times explains, the RIFs are all over the map:

Judge Illston’s pause, ordered in May, covered nearly two dozen federal agencies at different stages of their layoff plans.

In some cases, federal employees had been notified by their agencies that they were part of future layoffs, but were put on paid leave, with departure dates that fell after Judge Illston’s decision. Those employees, including dozens of workers at the State and Labor Departments, are now waiting to learn when they will be formally terminated, and whether they will have to return what they have been paid while on leave …

Most federal employees expect their agencies to announce layoffs, but do not know if they will be among those cut.

The most common estimates of those at immediate risk of RIFs show about 150,000 federal employees with a bull’s-eye on their backs. But in theory, the kind of government-wide demolition Trump ordered could reach 700,000, roughly the number of employees deemed “nonessential” in government-shutdown scenarios.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson sharply dissented from the Supreme Court order, noting the unprecedented nature of what Trump is trying to do:

This is not the first time that a President has wanted to restructure the Federal Government. Even the most cursory examination of history readily reveals that, over the past century, Presidents have worked with Congress — rather than around it — when seeking to significantly reorganize the agencies that comprise the Executive Branch …

The details of the programs that this executive action targets are the product of policy choices that Congress has made — a representative democracy at work. While thePresident no doubt has the authority to manage the Executive Branch, our system does not allow the President to re-write laws on his own under the guise of that authority.

But a concurring opinion from Justice Sonia Sotomayor showed a possible path for the majority to ultimately curb Trump’s excesses if it wishes to do so:

I agree with Justice Jackson that the President cannot restructure federal agencies in a manner inconsistent with congressional mandates. Here, however, the relevant Executive Order directs agencies to plan reorganizations and reductions in force “consistent with applicable law,” and the resulting joint memorandum from the Office of Management and Budget and Office of Personnel Management reiterates as much. The plans themselves are not before this Court, at this stage, and we thus have no occasion to consider whether they can and will be carried out consistent with the constraints of law.

In other words, Sotomayor is urging the majority to consider whether Trump & Co. are complying with their own injunction to defer to congressionally enacted laws when the case ultimately comes back to the Supreme Court for a final decision. There’s not much doubt the administration is indifferent toward or even hostile to any deference to Congress, but it’s likely the Court’s conservatives will find a way to ignore this president’s authoritarian pretensions.