Judge Blocks RIF Layoffs Amid Government Shutdown

Congressional Lawmakers Continue Work On Funding Bill After Government Shuts Down — Source: Andrew Harnik / Getty

Just last Friday, White House budget director and Project 2025 architect Russell Vought announced that reductions-in-force (RIF) layoffs had begun across federal government agencies amid the government shutdown that GOP leaders and White House officials have desperately tried to pin on the Democratic Party, despite Republicans having a stranglehold on just about all three branches of government. Well, on Wednesday, the Trump administration ran into its first roadblock in its agenda to purge the federal government’s workforce, which it had already talked extensively about doing long before the shutdown.

Yet another federal judge has told the Trump administration no.

According to NBC News, U.S. District Judge Susan Yvonne Illston of the Northern District of California ruled in favor of two unions that sued the Trump administration last month, ahead of the shutdown, and after White House officials began issuing public warnings about its plan to start RIF layoffs.

“The activities that are being undertaken here are contrary to the laws,” Illston said. “You can’t do this in a nation of laws.”

Illston said that the Trump administration had “taken advantage of the lapse in government spending and government functioning to assume that all bets are off, the laws don’t apply to them anymore, and they can impose the structures that they like on the government situation that they don’t like” — and, boy, was she spot on about that.

As we previously reported, during a Cabinet meeting last Thursday, President Donald Trump explicitly said he would be using the shutdown to target government programs started by Democrats.

“We’re only cutting Democrat programs, I hate to tell you, but we are cutting Democrat programs,” Trump reportedly said. “We will be cutting some very popular Democrat programs that aren’t popular with Republicans, frankly.”

So, not because the programs are wasteful. Not because he can prove Democrats are wiping their butts with American taxpayer money. Trump is simply gambling the livelihoods of federal workers and the greater good of the American people in a partisan political game where the house, the White House to be exact, makes all of the rules.

From NBC:

Illston said that she believed the plaintiffs can demonstrate that the Trump administration’s actions were illegal, in excess of authority and “arbitrary and capricious.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Elizabeth Themins Hedges argued that employment-related harms were “reparable” and that losing employment was not an “irreparable harm.”

But the judge issued a temporary restraining order, saying it would go into effect immediately. She said she plans to issue the order in writing later Wednesday.

An earlier filing from the government stated that the administration had begun laying off at least 4,000 workers.

Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, said that Trump “seems to think his government shutdown is distracting people from the harmful and lawlessness actions of his administration, but the American people are holding him accountable, including in the courts.”

Perryman rightfully said Trump’s bid to target federal workers is “a move straight out of Project 2025’s playbook,” referring to the Heritage Foundation’s plan for America that Trump often claimed he “had nothing to do with” before implementing virtually all of its policies, and then, eventually, introducing Vought as his Cabinet member “of PROJECT 2025 Fame.“

Shout out to the good judge for standing with the workers and against this anti-worker administration. We’re going to need more like her to stand up, especially during this shutdown, which House Majority Speaker Mike Johnson recently warned barreling toward one of the longest shutdowns in American history” — which, if true, means it would surpass the longest government shutdown in nearly half a century, which came during the first term of, you guessed it, Donald J. Trump.

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