The Trump administration can move forward with plans to slash the federal work force and dismantle federal agencies, the Supreme Court announced on Tuesday. It could result in job losses for tens of thousands of employees at agencies including the departments of housing and urban development, state and treasury.
The order, which lifted a lower court's ruling that had blocked mass layoffs, was unsigned and did not include a vote count. That is typical in such emergency applications. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a public dissent.
The case represents a key test of the extent of President Donald Trump's power to reorganise the government without input from Congress. The order is technically only temporary, guiding how the administration can proceed while the challenge to Trump’s plans continues. But in practice, it means he is free to pursue his plans.
In a two-paragraph order, the justices wrote that they had concluded that "the government is likely to succeed on its argument" that President Trump's executive order announcing plans to downsize the government was legal. The justices added that they had not expressed a view on the legality of specific layoffs or reorganisations by the Trump administration.
It was the latest in a series of recent victories for the Trump administration before the Supreme Court on emergency requests related to the President's efforts to rapidly reshape government.
Although the vote count was not listed, the order included a short public concurrence by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of the court's three liberals, suggesting broad agreement among the justices on the outcome. Justice Sotomayor wrote that she agreed with the court's decision, but she added that the trial court was "free to consider" the legality of the specifics of the Trump administration's downsizing plans.
In a 15-page dissent, Justice Jackson sharply criticised the court's decision, calling it "not only truly unfortunate but also hubristic and senseless" and arguing that it undercut the authority of trial court judges. "It is not this court's role to swoop in and second-guess a lower court's factual findings," Justice Jackson wrote, echoing her dissent last month in the case limiting the power of lower-court judges to block administration policies nationwide.
She said that "no one seriously disputes" that the President's executive order would "lead to enormous real-world consequences", including "the dismantling of much of the federal government as Congress has created it”.
"What one person (or President) might call bureaucratic bloat is a farmer's prospect for a healthy crop, a coal miner's chance to breathe free from black lung, or a pre-schooler's opportunity to learn in a safe environment," she wrote.