Supreme Court allows Trump admin to resume mass-firing plans

"[T]his Court sees fit to step in now and release the President’s wrecking ball at the outset of this litigation," Justice Jackson wrote in dissent.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday issued an order allowing the Trump administration to resume mass-firing plans across the federal government, prompting a sharp — and solo — dissent from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

At the request of the Justice Department on the emergency — or shadow — docket, the Supreme Court stayed a lower-court order that had blocked President Donald Trump’s efforts for the past two months in a lawsuit brought by unions, nonprofit organizations, and local governments.

Trump’s efforts — which were announced in an executive order and implemented initially through a joint memo from the heads of the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management — had been blocked by U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, who issued a temporary restraining order and then a preliminary injunction blocking the efforts because, she found, ”the President has neither constitutional nor, at this time, statutory authority to reorganize the executive branch.”

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court disagreed, holding that the government “is likely to succeed on its argument that the Executive Order and Memorandum are lawful” — a key factor in deciding whether to grant a requested stay to a party. Why and how that was so were left unexplained in the court’s unsigned order.

The court also held that “the other factors bearing on whether to grant a stay are satisfied” — which include a showing of “irreparable” harm and equities — and, as such, granted the stay.

In dissent, and referencing Illston’s orders, Jackson wrote that “that temporary, practical, harm-reducing preservation of the status quo was no match for this Court’s demonstrated enthusiasm for greenlighting this President’s legally dubious actions in an emergency posture.”

Only Jackson dissented publicly. Although the vote in shadow docket cases is not public, at least Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined the conservative majority, writing a brief concurrence.

Notably — and perhaps key to Sotomayor’s vote — the court did not weigh in on actual reduction-in-force (RIF) plans or agency cuts.

“We express no view on the legality of any Agency RIF and Reorganization Plan produced or approved pursuant to the Executive Order and Memorandum,” the unsigned order from the court stated.

Sotomayor, in her one-paragraph concurrence, noted 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,” she wrote. “I join the Court’s stay because it leaves the District Court free to consider those questions in the first instance.”

Jackson was not comforted by that fact — and wrote as much in her 15-page dissent.

“The Court has now stayed the District Court’s preliminary injunction—authorizing implementation of Executive Order No. 14210, and all the harmful upheaval that edict entails, while the lower courts evaluate its lawfulness. In my view, this was the wrong decision at the wrong moment, especially given what little this Court knows about what is actually happening on the ground.”

After detailing the history of government reorganization efforts, Jackson summed up the reality of Tuesday’s order:

The court chose yes, or, as Jackson put it: “[T]his Court sees fit to step in now and release the President’s wrecking ball at the outset of this litigation.”

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