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Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks at an election night watch party, Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024, in West Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon).
State attorneys general in 20 states suing the Trump administration over its mass firings of federal workers have “no hope of success” against the president and his Justice Department lawyers, the DOJ says — arguing in a new filing on Monday that “third parties cannot interject themselves” into government-employee affairs.
“The States cannot circumvent that channeling scheme by asserting downstream harm from those employment actions,” the DOJ said in an opposition filing on behalf of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Department of Education and other federal agencies being sued by unions in Washington, D.C., Maryland and 18 other states across the country where government workers live. “Nor do the States have any legitimate claims of their own,” the filing said.
DOJ lawyers are asking U.S. District Judge James Bredar to deny a motion filed by the states on Friday for a temporary restraining order (TRO) to “restrain and enjoin” the USDA from terminating federal probationary employees without making “specific, individualized determinations regarding the inadequacy of the employee’s conduct or performance” and without complying with requirements applicable to “Reductions in Force” procedures. The states are also seeking an order that would reinstate probationary employees who have been “unlawfully fired” by USDA officials and an order compelling the agency to file a status report with the court within 48 hours — and at “regular intervals thereafter” — identifying terminated probationary employees and describing the steps the government will take to comply with the order.
“Notably, this is not the first lawsuit to seek this relief,” the DOJ pointed out Monday in its opposition filing. “A set of unions sued in federal court in the District of Columbia a few weeks ago to rescind the termination of the probationary workers.”
The case the DOJ is referring to, specifically, involves a lawsuit filed by the National Treasury Employees Union in the District of Columbia, which accuses the Trump administration and Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought of unlawfully firing Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) employees without cause.
The group’s attorney, Deepak Gupta, said in court last week that if the judge overseeing the case had not issued a consent order on Feb. 14 temporarily blocking the terminations and deletions, the Trump administration would’ve wiped out the CFPB that very same day.
According to the DOJ’s opposition filing Monday, the district court denied the relief requested in the CFPB case, similar to what’s being asked for in the USDA case. “Then, other unions and organizational plaintiffs sued in the Northern District of California, also claiming downstream harms from the terminations,” the DOJ said.
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The judge in the California case agreed to restrain “since-revised guidance” on probationary removals from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and acknowledged that it “could not and would not” rescind terminations, according to the DOJ.
“The third time is not the charm,” DOJ lawyers said Monday. “Like the unions and the organizational plaintiffs, the States are strangers to the employment relationships at issue, and cannot disrupt the exclusive remedial scheme that Congress put in place to adjudicate these disputes.”
The DOJ props up its argument about the TRO denial and mass firings on “a promise” that it claims Trump made during his 2024 campaign to raise “standards” for federal government employment and “improve” the Civil Service workforce. Its opposition filing points to Trump’s signed memorandum on his first day in office declaring that “American citizens deserve an excellent and efficient Federal workforce that attracts the highest caliber of civil servants committed to achieving the freedom, prosperity, and democratic rule that our Constitution promotes.”
According to the DOJ, the firings are “consistent with the new administration’s focus on federal employee performance” and should not be blocked by states with no power over government-employee relations.
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“The action has no hope of success, because third parties cannot interject themselves into the employment relationship between the United States and government workers, which is governed by a comprehensive statutory scheme that provides an exclusive remedial avenue to challenge adverse personnel actions,” the DOJ said, alleging that a TRO would impose “significant and unrecoverable” costs on the USDA. “The relief sought by the States would require the federal government to pay salaries and benefits for persons who it otherwise would not be obligated to pay,” the DOJ said. “These expenses are likely unrecoverable from terminated probationers even if Defendants ultimately prevail in this action.”
USDA lawsuit, filed by the 20 states in Baltimore federal court, claims Trump admin officials failed to follow “reduction in force” procedures mandated under federal regulations, including providing 60 days’ notice to workers before kicking them to the curb.
“These large-scale, indiscriminate firings are not only subjecting the Plaintiff States and communities across the country to chaos,” the states say in their lawsuit. “They are also against the law.”
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