The Trump administration‘s plan to lay off thousands of federal workers moved closer to a reality on Tuesday, when the United States Supreme Court lifted a lower court order that had temporarily blocked the terminations.
The initial lawsuit addressed by the lower court was jointly filed on April 28 by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and 11 nonprofit organizations, as well as the local governments of states including California, Texas, and Illinois. The legal move intended to preserve the federal workforce, which was among the cuts included in President Trump’s Executive Order 14210.
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In a statement, the groups warned that Tuesday’s ruling puts “services that the American people rely on in grave jeopardy” and “does not change the simple and clear fact that reorganizing government functions and laying off federal workers en masse haphazardly without any congressional approval is not allowed by our Constitution.”
The lower court ruling halted the mass firing and reorganization of 19 federal agencies and departments, including at the State Department and the Social Security Administration. Elsewhere in the court system, another lawsuit took aim against the administration’s decision to bypass federal protocol, which requires Congress to approve cuts at such a large scale, as the Washington Post reported.
“For some reason, this Court sees fit to step in now and release the President’s wrecking ball at the outset of this litigation,” Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her 15-page dissent. “In my view, this decision is not only truly unfortunate but also hubristic and senseless.”
Jackson was the only one of nine Supreme Court members to dissent, with two known liberal justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor siding this time with conservatives.
In her opinion, Sotomayor wrote that planned reorganizations and workforce reductions were “consistent with applicable law.”
She added: “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.”
The lower court judge can still assess the legality of the administration’s plans after they have gone into effect, which could effectively bring the case back before the Supreme Court at a later date.
This decision is not expected to impact a preliminary injunction in a separate lawsuit that stopped terminations and restructuring at sub-agencies of the Department of Health and Human Services such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a center within the Food and Drug Administration, and Head Start.
The State Department is still planning to cut 15 percent of its staff, with plans for other government agencies remaining unclear.
Prior to the ruling, however, thousands of federal workers had already been fired, deferred resignation, or had been placed on leave. Despite Elon Musk’s departure from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which oversaw and was the driving force behind much of these planned overhauls, changes are expected to continue.
Art programs and grants funded via government agencies, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, have already been subject to drastic cuts. Some of those funds are expected to support the creation of new statues at new National Garden of Heroes to the tune of $40 million.
Earlier this week, it was announced that exhibition programming at the Smithsonian Institution is currently under review by the White House.