(Reuters) -President Donald Trump’s administration brought its bid to purge the federal workforce to the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, challenging a judicial directive to rehire thousands of fired government employees and arguing that the judge overstepped his authority.
The Justice Department in a filing asked the Supreme Court to block a March 13 order by San Francisco-based U.S. District Judge William Alsup for six federal agencies to reinstate thousands of probationary – meaning recently hired – employees dismissed as part of Trump’s campaign to downsize and reshape the government.
The judge faulted the administration for improperly terminating en masse the probationary workers and cast doubt on the justification presented by the government that the firings were the result of poor employee performance.
In its filing, the Justice Department said that Alsup’s order lets 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.
These two branches as well as the legislative branch – Congress – were established as coequal in the U.S. Constitution in order to provide checks and balances to the power they wield.
“This court should stop the ongoing assault on the constitutional structure before further damage is wrought,” the department added.
Probationary workers typically have less than one year of service in their current roles, though some are longtime federal employees serving in new roles. They have fewer job protections than other government workers, but in general can be fired only for poor job performance.
The actions by the judge represented a significant blow for a high-profile effort by Trump and billionaire advisor Elon Musk to drastically shrink the federal bureaucracy.
Unions, nonprofit groups and the state of Washington claimed that the U.S. Office of Personnel Management exceeded its authority for the mass firings. Alsup, an appointee of Democratic former President Bill Clinton, agreed.
“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,” Alsup said at a hearing.
Alsup’s ruling applied to probationary employees at the U.S. Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy, Department of Interior and the Treasury Department.
In a separate case, a Baltimore-based federal judge ordered the administration to reinstate probationary workers at 18 federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the U.S. Agency for International Development, in a lawsuit brought by 20 Democratic-led states.
Trump, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and other members of his administration have accused a number of federal judges who have issued orders impeding the Republican president’s actions of judicial overreach at the expense of presidential authority. Trump last week called for impeachment by Congress of the judge presiding over a legal challenge to deportation flights, drawing a rebuke from U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts.
Trump last week in a social media post called for an end to nationwide injunctions.
“If Justice Roberts and the United States Supreme Court do not fix this toxic and unprecedented situation IMMEDIATELY, our Country is in very serious trouble!” Trump wrote in that post.
The Justice Department told the Supreme Court in Monday’s filing that lower courts have issued than 40 judicial orders impeding its policies “without sufficient regard for limits on their own jurisdiction or to defects in plaintiffs’ representations about the law and the underlying facts.”
“This situation is unsustainable,” the filing stated.
Trump’s administration on March 13 asked the Supreme Court to narrow a judicial block imposed by lower courts on his attempt to restrict automatic U.S. birthright citizenship.
“Universal injunctions have reached epidemic proportions since the start of the current administration,” the Justice Department said in the March 13 filing. “This court should declare that enough is enough before district courts’ burgeoning reliance on universal injunctions becomes further entrenched.”
Trump, along with Musk, has moved to eliminate thousands of federal jobs, dismantle certain agencies and remove the heads of independent agencies despite congressionally authorized job protections as he seeks to remake the federal government in a second term as president that began in January.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)
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