Trump Layoff Pause by Judge Heralds New Era in Firing Claims

The courts are poised to tackle broad separation-of-powers arguments against the Trump administration’s historic cuts to the federal workforce, after a federal judge said the president likely violated the US Constitution.

The administration appealed a temporary order from Judge Susan Illston of the US District Court for the Northern District of California, which halted widespread layoffs and firings of government employees.

The court’s May 9 order sets the stage for an ensuing fight over whether to enjoin the administration from moving forward on its federal workforce cuts while the litigation proceeds. Illston’s interest in entertaining the unions’ broad, separation-of-powers claims in this initial order could signal the court’s appetite for constitutional law arguments during the looming injunction phase of the case.

“We’re seeing the American judiciary really trying to stand up for checks and balances and we’re seeing it be willing to look at the case in the real world,” said Suzanne Summerlin, an attorney for federal workers.

Illston’s order highlights a key question in the case: Who has the authority to reorganize the federal government?

“The President has the authority to seek changes to executive branch agencies, but he must do so in lawful ways and, in the case of large-scale reorganizations, with the cooperation of the legislative branch,” she wrote.

That broad, separation-of-powers component of her order in the earliest stages of the litigation “sets this case apart and makes it without precedent,” said William Resh, an associate professor of public policy at the University of Southern California.

Shifting Legal Arguments

The court’s 14-day restraining order differs from an injunction both in its lower proof threshold for plainitffs and provision of more immediate relief.

“They’ve got people that are hurting,” said David Super, a constitutional law scholar and professor at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington. “A number of the plaintiffs are nonprofits that are having their access to funding interfered with. Others are recipients of funds who can’t get through to anyone at the agencies because everyone’s gone. Their hope is to get relief right away.”

The Trump administration fired tens of thousands of employees nationwide, from agencies including the Health and Human Services Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The plaintiffs, which include American Federation of Government Employees, said the administration plans to lay off hundreds of thousands more at Departments of Labor, State, Defense, Energy, and elsewhere.

Typically, TROs aren’t treated as appealable, although the Trump administration was quick to appeal theirs to the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on May 10.
Injunctive relief on the other hand serves as a more useful test of the defendants’ intent.

The plaintiffs are seeking a preliminary injunction to hold the order over the entire length of the litigation. Illston has ordered a briefing schedule to wrap up this month.

According to the complaint, a majority of the layoffs haven’t been conducted yet and Summerlin said the plaintiffs will likely seek an ultimate stop to the RIF plans, with the potential for back pay remedies further down the road for laid off employees.

But Illston made clear in her TRO that she thinks the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of at least some of their claims—a key threshold for securing an injunction. That the coalition could secure that minor victory by advancing constitutional claims represents a shift in the types of cases challenging the Trump administration’s federal workforce squeeze.

Other plaintiffs tried to make the case that Trump was violating the constitution when he first took office and attempted to downsize the federal workforce by freezing funds and axing probationary workers. But courts were dubious of what they considered plaintiffs’ speculative claims, and wary of wading into whole-of-government claims. Since then, there have been mixed results from cases challenging individual federal agencies or layoffs of certain workers or types of employees.

Now, the unions are dusting off their comprehensive constitutional claims once more, this time equipped with more demonstrable harm and strategies to clear standing hurdles.

Many past cases included separation-of-powers claims, but relied on administrative law claims to seek emergency relief, Super said.

“This case is different and significant in that it is moving back to a broad, government-wide approach like that first generation of cases and that in that it is foregrounding the separation-of-powers issues,” he said. “Rather than saying that these are grossly inappropriate decisions, it is saying that these are illegal decisions.”

Jurisprudence Questions

On appeal, the plaintiffs are set to receive further scrutiny over questions on standing and subject matter jurisdiction, which plagued previous claims against the administration.

Judges in Massachusetts and D.C. refused to grant relief for unions, saying they either couldn’t show current harm stemming from Trump’s actions, or directing them instead to exhaust options with the Federal Labor Relations Authority.

The Northern District of California has been friendly to unions’ claims, however. Judge William Alsup allowed a complaint probationary workers’ firings to proceed because the plaintiffs included non-union groups, that could successfully show harm and didn’t have administrative appeals options.

Summerlin said that while Illston’s decision centered on the constitutional arguments, the case may hinge more on “procedural, nitpicky,” points before appellate judges.

“It’s more palatable for the upper courts to not worry about the lofty constitutional issues,” she said. “They might not want to face those.”

But Summerlin said the complaint is strategically positioned withstand jurisprudence questions. The harms alleged in this suit cannot be remedied by the FLRA or the Merit Systems Protection Board, she said.

“There’s an argument that this is different than when you’re dealing with a grievance or an unfair labor practice,” she said. “Congress wanted labor disputes going through the FLRA, not broad constitutional issues like the ones presented here.”

The plaintiffs are represented by Altshuler Berzon LLP, the Democracy Forward Foundation, and the AFGE. The government is represented by the Justice Department.

AFGE v. Trump, N.D. Cal., No. 3:25-cv-03698, 5/9/25.