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President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, March 4, 2025 (AP Photo/Alex Brandon).
The Trump administration on Friday implored a federal court of appeals to allow administrative agencies to go forward with controversial plans for massive layoffs of the federal workforce. Moving with a quickness, the court shut that avenue down.
In a 16-page filing with the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, the U.S. Department of Justice requested emergency relief in the form of an immediate administrative stay — as well as a broader stay pending appeal of the underlying case — that would overturn the nationwide injunction issued by a Baltimore district court on March 13.
“The district court’s sweeping order compelling the reinstatement of thousands of terminated employees at eighteen different federal agencies is legally indefensible and irreparably harms the federal government every day that it remains in effect,” the reply reads. “[T]his Court should enter a stay pending appeal and an immediate administrative stay.”
By the end of the day, however, the clerk of the court — on behalf of a three-judge panel — issued a terse order that rejected the government’s ask with zero analysis of the arguments.
The two-sentence decision did offer a procedural explanation: the district court overseeing the matter currently has a hearing scheduled for March 26 where the judge intends to “promptly grant or deny preliminary injunctive relief thereafter.”
In the case, U.S. District Judge James Kelleher Bredar, a Barack Obama appointee, ordered the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other agencies named in the lawsuit to reinstate probationary employees fired since Jan. 20. Such employees were ordered to be rehired by March 17.
The order further prohibits the government from additional layoffs that do not meet statutory standards. In real terms, in order to perform so-called “reductions in force,” the government must show such employees have a history of poor conduct or performance.
In its reply brief, the government essayed an iteration of an increasingly used argument against judicial review. The Trump administration has, in both public statements and various court filings in multiple cases, inveighed against the power of district judges to issue nationwide injunctions against the executive branch. In the present case, DOJ lawyers slightly modified their opprobrium to account for Bredar’s self-imposed deadline of March 27. On that date, the court will consider whether to extend or cancel the restraining order.
“This Court should be exceptionally wary of a jurisdictional ruling that would permit every district judge in this Circuit to bind the Executive Branch for at least fourteen days before the government can even begin asking an appellate court for relief,” the DOJ told the trio of judges.
While the panel did not appear moved by those time-focused arguments, Circuit Judge Allison Jones Rushing, a Trump appointee, did offer some more fundamental hope for the government on the nationwide injunction argument — at least in this case.
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In a concurrence, she said the district court improperly determined the government broke federal law and “lost sight of who the Plaintiffs are and what injury they claim when it concluded a nationwide injunction was warranted.”
To hear Rushing tell it, this case poses a question where some states claim an injury while several others actively reject such an injury exists. The district court, on the other hand, fashioned relief that purports to vindicate the rights of the citizens for each of the 50 states. The jurist suggests that was a bridge too far.
“I write separately to echo the growing concerns over district courts issuing nationwide injunctions to order redress for those who have not sought it,” Rushing’s concurrence reads. “The district court here required numerous federal agencies to reinstate fired probationary workers across all 50 States. It ordered relief because Plaintiffs — which are 19 States and the District of Columbia — asserted an injury stemming from the federal government’s failure to notify the States of its intent to fire probationary employees within their territory. But the district court extended its injunction to cover non-plaintiff States.”
