By Jess Bravin
WASHINGTON—The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court on Monday to block a judge’s order requiring it to reinstate more than 16,000 federal employees, as administration officials vow to seek the justices’ intervention in clearing away lower court rulings that have slowed Trump policies.
Earlier this month, a federal district judge in San Francisco ordered the government to reinstate probationary employees fired at a half dozen agencies under the Trump administration’s fast-moving plan to shrink the federal government. U.S. District Judge William Alsup found that the administration had failed to comply with legal procedures required for the layoffs.
Alsup’s order, and a similar one from a federal judge in Maryland, require agencies to offer the employees their jobs back while litigation over the legality of the layoffs proceeds.
In her Supreme Court brief, acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris argues that the case should have been thrown out of court because it was filed by labor unions and other organizations rather than the terminated employees themselves. Federal law requires government employees to raise complaints through an internal process before going to court, Harris said.
Alsup’s temporary order lets “third parties hijack the employment relationship between the federal government and its workforce,” Harris wrote. The order gives “a single district court the Executive Branch’s powers of personnel management on the flimsiest of grounds and the hastiest of timelines. That is no way to run a government.”
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