The court said state attorneys general who sued over the firings don’t have standing.
A federal appeals court on April 9 lifted a court order requiring 20 federal agencies to reinstate newer workers they had fired, clearing the way for President Donald Trump’s administration to resume mass terminations.
The federal judge who entered the order appears to have gone beyond his remit, the majority of a panel of judges at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit stated in a ruling staying his order as the government’s appeal is considered.
“The Government is likely to succeed in showing the district court lacked jurisdiction over Plaintiffs’ claims, and the Government is unlikely to recover the funds disbursed to reinstated probationary employees,” Judge Allison Jones Rushing
said in the opinion, with which Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III concurred.
Under Supreme Court precedent, four factors govern whether a party should receive a stay pending appeal, including whether the party likely faces irreparable injury if a stay is not issued.
The ruling means District Judge James Bredar’s order,
entered in March and later
narrowed to the 19 plaintiff states and Washington, is no longer in effect.
Bredar had
ordered federal agencies, including the Department of Treasury and the Department of Agriculture, to reinstate nearly 25,000 workers.
The attorneys general who brought the
suit, including Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, said their states were harmed by the mass terminations that started shortly after Trump took office, including by having to deal with an increase in applications for unemployment benefits.
Bredar ruled on March 13 that the agencies failed to give advance notice and conduct individualized assessments of employees when carrying out the firings. He required agencies to reinstate the workers before March 17.
The order was
narrowed on April 1 to only workers in the plaintiff states and Washington. Two more agencies, the Department of Defense and the Office of Personnel Management, were also added at the time, bringing the total to 20.
Government lawyers recently
urged the Fourth Circuit to stay Bredar’s order, arguing he did not have jurisdiction “to superintend the federal government’s employment relationships at the behest of states that are strangers to those relationships.”
They also said the order forced the government to pay unnecessary employees and that there was no way to recoup the salaries if the government ultimately were to prevail in the case.
The attorneys general
said in response that if the appeals court intervened, it would “abruptly terminate the employment of thousands of public servants through no fault of their own” and “again plunge the Appellee States into chaos by straining their unemployment and public benefit systems and leaving them scrambling to comply with federal statutory mandates.”
The Fourth Circuit’s order noted that the Supreme Court just
blocked a similar order from a different judge who had required six agencies to reinstate fired probationary workers. The majority also stated that the clerk for the Fourth Circuit would set an expedited briefing schedule for the case.
Judge DeAndrea Gist Benjamin said in a dissent that the district court does have jurisdiction in part because the states showed that they were harmed by not being notified of the terminations. She also said that, in her view, the government had not proven any of the factors required for a stay pending appeal.
The point on not being able to recoup worker salaries, for instance, is not an irreparable injury because the government would have had to pay the salaries for a period of time if it had properly followed the legal process for mass terminations, the dissenting judge said.
