The US Supreme Court on Tuesday gave a green signal to the Donald Trump administration to move ahead with its plans of dramatically downsizing the government jobs and mass workforce cuts across numerous agencies. The move could see layoffs of thousands of workers and a massive reshaping of the federal bureaucracy.
Supreme Court judges in an unsigned orders overrode the directive of lower courts that temporarily halted the layoffs of tens of thousands of workers, which have been led by the Department of Government Efficiency.
The brief order further mentions that the Trump administration was “likely to succeed” in its argument that the federal job cuts were legally within its power.
The top court said in its order that the justices did not have any specific job cuts in front of them, only an executive order issued by President Donald Trump and an administration directive to agencies to pursue layoffs.
The Supreme Court has sided with Donald Trump in several cases on an emergency basis since he returned to office in January, including clearing the way for implementation of some of his hardline immigration policies.
Tuesday’s decision comes as the latest win for the Trump administration in its efforts to gain power in the executive field.
US layoffs: What did Supreme Court judges say?
“The plans themselves are not before this Court, at this stage, and we thus have no occasion to consider whether they can and will be carried out consistent with the constraints of law,” said Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of three liberals on the top court.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the only dissenting voice among the nine justices on the court as federal job cuts got a green light.
“For some reason, this Court sees fit to step in now and release the President’s wrecking ball at the outset of this litigation,” Jackson, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden, said.
The justice accused her colleagues of a “demonstrated enthusiasm for greenlighting this President’s legally dubious actions in an emergency posture.”
“This executive action promises mass employee terminations, widespread cancellation of federal programs and services, and the dismantling of much of the Federal Government as Congress has created it,” she said.
Tens of thousands of federal workers have been fired, have left their jobs via deferred resignation programs or have been placed on leave. There is no official figure for the job cuts, but at least 75,000 federal employees took deferred resignation and thousands of probationary workers have already been let go, according to a report by The Associated Press.