Instead, the unsigned opinion—approved by every member of the high court except Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson—held that the nonprofit groups that sued President Donald Trump's administration had not demonstrated they suffered "injury" due to the firing of 16,000 probationary employees, and that the plaintiffs did not have legal standing to sue and try to pause the firings.
The majority on the court sided with Trump's administration, which had argued that a lower court judge—Senior Judge William Alsup in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California—had overreached by ordering the reinstatement of people who had been fired from six federal agencies including the Pentagon, the Department of Energy, and the Department of the Treasury.
AFGE and other plaintiffs—including the Main Street Alliance and the American Public Health Association—suggested that the technical ruling, which will stand while the case regarding the probationary employees moves forward, does not change the fact that "thousands of public service employees were unlawfully fired in an effort to cripple federal agencies and their crucial programs that serve millions of Americans every day."
"Today's order by the U.S. Supreme Court is deeply disappointing but is only a momentary pause in our efforts to enforce the trial court's orders and hold the federal government accountable," said the coalition. "Despite this setback, our coalition remains unwavering in fighting for these workers who were wronged by the administration, and in protecting the freedoms of the American people. This battle is far from over."
The plaintiffs argued that the Trump administration not only acted outside its authority by dismissing 16,000 federal workers, but based the firings on a false claim by Charles Ezell, acting director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
They said Ezell ordered the termination of the probationary employees in a template letter that falsely claimed they were being fired for poor performance; federal employees are protected from at-will firings, and their supervisors must have a complaint about performance or misconduct to immediately dismiss them.
Many of the workers who learned they had been fired last month had not been at their jobs long enough to receive any performance reviews, or had only received positive feedback about their work.
In his earlier ruling last month, Alsup wrote that while "each federal agency has the statutory authority to hire and fire its employees, even at scale, subject to certain safeguards," OPM does not have that authority.
"Yet that is what happened here—en masse," said Alsup.
"The conservative Supreme Court stepped in and used a technical excuse to let Trump have his way."
The plaintiffs said in their lawsuit that other recent court rulings ordering the administration to reinstate fired employees bolstered their view that the dismissals were illegal. Last week, another federal judge in Maryland ordered the reinstatement of federal workers in 19 states and the District of Columbia.
The coaliton also denounced the government's claim that calling the workers back after terminating their employment would be onerous.
"The scale of the task is simply a reflection of the scale of the government's own unlawful action and its 'move fast and break things' ethos," the plaintiffs wrote. "Accepting the government's argument would mean that it can act lawlessly as long as it acts quickly and destructively enough that restoring the status quo would be an 'enormous' task. That is not and cannot be the law."
The administration's argument was reminiscent of its claim in another case that the Supreme Court ruled on Monday—that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was expelled from the country by immigration officials and sent to El Salvador's prison system, despite having no criminal record and having proven to a judge earlier that he could face persecution and torture in El Salvador.
White House officials have claimed in recent days they have no way of bringing Abrego Garcia back to the U.S., as a lower coirt judge demanded. On Monday, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily blocked District Judge Paula Xinis' order demanding that he be returned.
On Tuesday, Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-N.M.) said that regarding the fired workers, "the conservative Supreme Court stepped in and used a technical excuse to let Trump have his way."
