On Friday, a federal appellate court upheld a lower court order that barred the Trump administration from pursuing ambitious plans to reorganize the federal government and fire federal employees.
In a 2-1 decision, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied a request to stay the restraining order issued earlier this month by U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, a Bill Clinton appointee.
In no uncertain terms, the majority dismissed the government’s legal arguments as completely deficient in terms of procedure and substance.
“It has now been over a month since Plaintiffs first filed their complaint,” the judge notes. “Defendants have yet to show the district court—or us—a single piece of evidence in support of its allegation of irreparable injury resulting from the district court’s [temporary restraining order] TRO or preliminary injunction.”
On February 11, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative.” The order claimed to “begin” a “critical transformation of the Federal bureaucracy” by eliminating waste, bloat, and insularity.
In practice, Trump’s plans would require administrative agency heads to quickly “initiate large-scale reductions in force” (RIFs), or massive layoffs, in support of the goal of restructuring the government.
Illston applied the brakes to those efforts.
The lower court reasoned that the three agencies primarily responsible for the firings and reorganization – the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) – lacked the necessary statutory authority to carry out such tasks.
“In sum, no statute gives OPM, OMB, or DOGE the authority to direct other federal agencies to engage in large-scale terminations, restructuring, or elimination of itself,” Illston wrote in an email. “Such action is far outside the bounds of any authority that Congress vested in OPM or OMB, and, as noted, DOGE has no statutory authority whatsoever.”
The appeals court echoed the district court’s findings regarding the authority of the three agencies in charge of the reorganization plans, concluding that each agency exceeded its statutory authority.
“As Defendants concede, OMB and OPM have only supervisory authority over the other federal agencies,” the court’s decree states. “DOGE has no statutory authority.” We thus concur with the district court that these organizations’ actions directing other federal agencies to engage in restructuring and large-scale RIFs were ultra vires.”
Attorneys for the United States Department of Justice argued that the take care clause of the United States Constitution provided sufficient justification in the absence of statutory authority in their request for a stay of proceedings.
The appeals court dismissed these alternative arguments as merely expedient – not unlike too little, too late.
“Defendants never argued that the Constitution was a proper source of authority for the Executive Order, relying solely on federal statutes governing agency authority,” as the order continues. “After being rejected by the district court, they change tactics, claiming that the Constitution does confer such authority. Both arguments are ineffective.
Neither the Constitution nor any federal statute empowers the President to direct the large-scale reorganization of the federal government at issue.”
The government, for its part, argued that President Donald Trump was simply providing “policy direction to executive agencies.”
But the panel would not have it.
“[S]uch a characterization is at best disingenuous, and at worst flatly contradictory to the record,” the judge’s ruling states. “Defendants cannot now assert that this language merely constituted guidance.”
The order explains why this argument failed, in detail:
The Executive Order at issue here far exceeds the President’s supervisory powers under the Constitution. The President enjoys significant removal power with respect to the appointed officers of federal agencies. But even that power is not unlimited. Determinative of the case before us, the President has never exercised such control over inferior officers, much less over the thousands of rank-and-file employees affected by the Executive Order.
In dissent, Circuit Judge Consuelo Callahan, a George W. Bush appointee, argued that the district court should have guided its legal analysis by asking whether the firings would have rendered agencies unable to meet statutory obligations.
The majority, led by Senior Circuit Judge William A. Fletcher, another Clinton appointee, accepted that standard for the sake of argument, but still found the government’s behavior inadequate.
“We do not agree with the dissent that this is the proper standard,” the majority states. “But even applying the dissent’s preferred standard, Defendants are unlikely to meet it.
Defendants have failed to provide any evidence that the forty planned RIFs across seventeen agencies would not essentially eliminate Congressionally created agencies or prevent them from carrying out their statutory duties.
