WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court blocked on Tuesday a judge’s order for President Donald Trump‘s administration to rehire thousands of fired employees, acting in a dispute over his effort to slash the federal workforce and dismantle parts of the government.
The court put on hold San Francisco-based U.S. Judge William Alsup’s March 13 injunction requiring six federal agencies to reinstate thousands of recently hired probationary employees while litigation challenging the legality of the dismissals continues.
The court in a brief, unsigned order said the nine nonprofit organizations that were granted an injunction in response to their lawsuit hadn’t demonstrated they have the legal standing to sue. The court said that its order did not address claims by other plaintiffs in the case, “which did not form the basis of the district court’s preliminary injunction.”
The Supreme Court didn’t rule on whether the firings were actually lawful and whether the administration could ultimately be forced to rehire the workers.
Liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson publicly dissented from the decision. Jackson explained that she didn’t think the Trump administration had demonstrated enough urgency to warrant the Supreme Court stepping in before lower courts had a chance to more fully rule in the case.
Trump and billionaire adviser Elon Musk have moved quickly to shrink the federal bureaucracy and remake the government. One of their avenues was to fire en masse thousands of probationary workers, who typically have less than one year of service in their current roles, though some are longtime federal employees serving in new roles.
What did the lower court rule?
The March 13 preliminary injunction from Alsup, who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton, applied to probationary employees at the U.S. Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Energy, Interior and Treasury. Alsup ruled that the U.S. Office of Personnel Management had improperly ordered agencies to fire workers en masse.
The administration argued that the employees’ performances were individually reviewed by the agencies with the power to hire and fire them, but Alsup said that’s not what the evidence showed.
“It is a sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that’s a lie,” he said.
In a separate case, a federal judge in Baltimore also ordered the administration to reinstate thousands of fired probationary workers at 18 federal agencies in 19 mostly Democratic-led states and Washington, D.C., which had sued over the mass firings.
Elon Musk listens to U.S. President Donald Trump speak in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 11, 2025.
The San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals refused on March 26 to halt Alsup’s order.
What did the Trump administration say?
Alsup’s order, the Justice Department wrote in a March 24 filing, let the plaintiffs in the case “hijack the employment relationship between the federal government and its workforce,” violating the separation of power between the judiciary and executive branches of the government as laid out in the U.S. Constitution.
The Trump administration also said Alsup’s order is part of an “untenable trend” of judges improperly interceding, leading to “chaos” as the administration scrambles to comply.
“Only this Court can end the interbranch power grab,” Sarah Harris, the Justice Department’s acting solicitor general, told the justices.
Federal workers shout chants during a rally across the street from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) headquarters, in support of the civil service in the wake of mass firings, and organized by the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) in Kansas City, Missouri, U.S. March 15, 2025.
Trump has string of Supreme Court victories
Tuesday’s decision was the latest in recent days in which the Supreme Court sided with Trump. In a 5-4 decision Monday, it tossed out a temporary restraining order that blocked Trump from deporting Venezuelan migrants using a 1798 law that historically has been employed only in wartime. Justices said that lawsuit was brought in the wrong court but didn’t rule on whether Trump’s actions were lawful.
In a 5-4 decision Friday, the high court let the Trump administration proceed with millions of dollars of cuts to teacher training grants – part of his crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
The court earlier on Monday also temporarily halted a judge’s order requiring the administration to return by the end of the day a Salvadoran man who the government has acknowledged was deported in error to El Salvador.
Contributing: Reuters
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: US Supreme Court halts reinstatement of fired federal employees