Lawsuit over government layoffs back in court as shutdown drags on : NPR

Signs bearing Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought are seen during a press conference by congressional Democrats to protest the Trump administration’s mass layoffs of federal employees in Washington, DC, Tuesday, October 14.

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Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

A federal judge in San Francisco will consider Tuesday whether to indefinitely end the Trump administration’s mass layoffs of federal employees during the government shutdown.

The hearing comes nearly two weeks after U.S. District Judge Susan Illston temporarily halted thousands of layoffs, known as RIFs, or workforce reductions, at agencies where the federal employee unions that filed the lawsuit, including the American Federation of Government Employees, have members or bargaining units.

The Trump administration responded. It is argued, first, that the court lacks jurisdiction to hear the case, and second, that the unions have failed to demonstrate that they are suffering irreparable harm as a result of the administration’s actions.

Since Illston first issued his temporary restraining order, both sides have discussed its scope. The Trump administration initially determined that this 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 who work for the Treasury Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Illston later amended the order, including expanding it to cover six additional unions.

Regardless of the outcome of President Trump’s latest attempts to cut the federal workforce, it is clear that the administration’s modus operandi — taking drastic and legally questionable steps to quickly eliminate jobs — is taking a toll on workers, as some of the testimony submitted to the court in a lawsuit demonstrates.

For many of those receiving layoff notices amid the shutdown, this isn’t the first time the Trump administration has tried to fire them.

In a statement filed in court, Mayra Medrano, a program analyst at the Department of Commerce’s Minority Business Development Agency and a member of the National Federation of Federal Employees, writes 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 enormous physical and mental distress,” she wrote, noting that she suffered a severe stress-induced seizure while on administrative leave this spring.

She writes that she now feels like she is reliving this nightmare.

“Receiving a notice of the RIF during the government shutdown, on top of the previous RIF, was traumatic and will have a lasting impact on my health,” she wrote. “It doesn’t seem like the administration has thought about or cares about this long-term impact.”

Medrano did not respond to NPR’s request for additional comment.

At the initial hearing in the case two weeks ago, plaintiffs’ attorney Danielle Leonard sought to draw attention to the emotional trauma federal workers are experiencing, pointing to comments made by White House Office of Management and Budget chief Russell Vought before Trump’s re-election.

In a 2023 private speech by ProPublica, Vought, who is now widely seen as the force behind the layoffs, said he wanted government bureaucrats to be “traumatized” to the point of no longer wanting to go to work.

“That’s exactly what they’re 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 represents just a fraction of the federal employees laid off since Trump returned to the White House in January.

Last August, the director of the Office of Personnel Management, Scott Kupor, said that approximately 300,000 federal workers would leave the government by the end of the year, emphasizing that 80% of these departures were voluntary.

That means that even before the shutdown, about 60,000 federal workers were facing involuntary separation, according to Kupor estimates.

According to OPM, another 154,000 workers have accepted the Trump administration’s “At the Crossroads” buyout offer. Many of those who accepted the buyout told NPR they feared being fired if they didn’t leave.