The high court’s order blocks a May decision by a California court that temporarily blocked the efforts of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to drastically reduce the size of his agency’s workforce.
The U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay in favor of the Trump administration on Tuesday, allowing the sweeping reorganizations of federal agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services, to proceed.
A California court in May temporarily suspended the government’s efforts to drastically reduce its workforce—a move that would have seen more than 10,000 employees laid off at the HHS. In its order on Tuesday, the high court reversed this decision, contending that the government is “likely to succeed” in arguing that the reductions in force (RIF), carried out through a February executive order, are “lawful.”
“We express no view on the legality of any Agency RIF and Reorganization Plan produced or approved pursuant to the Executive Order,” the Supreme Court said.
The court order was unsigned, but Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a liberal, dissented. “Congress has the power to establish administrative agencies and detail their functions,” Jackson wrote. “Over the past century, Presidents who have attempted to reorganize the Federal Government have first obtained authorization from Congress to do so.”
President Donald Trump, she argued, has deviated from this practice.
The case that led to the California court’s injunction in May was filed by unions, employee groups and local governments, seeking to block Trump’s federal reorganization. In her order in May, District Judge Susan Illston echoed Jackson’s argument, writing that “agencies may not conduct large-scale reorganizations and reductions in force in blatant disregard of Congress’s mandates, and a president may not initiate large-scale executive branch reorganization without partnering with Congress.”
While this case currently has swung in favor of the administration, there remain other lawsuits that stand in the way of its reorganization push.
Earlier this month, for instance, a Rhode Island District Court ruled against the HHS, preventing it from “implementing its RIF or other restructuring initiative with regard to specific portions of HHS, like the CDC, the Office of Head Start at HHS, and Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at HHS. “The executive branch does not have the authority to order, organize, or implement wholesale changes to the structure and function of the agencies created by Congress,” Rhode Island District Judge Melissa DuBose wrote in her ruling at the time. This case was brought in May by a group of 19 states plus the District of Colombia.
A separate lawsuit was filed last month, this time from seven former employees who claimed that their terminations were based on “error-ridden” records.
