Left: U.S. District Judge Susan Illston (U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California). Right: President Donald Trump speaks in the Cabinet Room of the White House, Friday, Oct. 17, 2025, in Washington (AP Photo/Alex Brandon).
A judge has ordered the Trump administration to reinstate hundreds of federal workers to their jobs, finding that several federal agencies unlawfully terminated them during the recent government shutdown.
U.S. District Judge Susan Illston issued a preliminary injunction this week commanding six agencies to rescind their reduction in force (RIF) notices "executed or implemented" between Oct. 1 and Nov. 12. These agencies are the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Office of Personnel Management (OPM), Department of State, Department of Education, General Services Administration (GSA), and the Small Business Administration (SBA).
The Bill Clinton appointee opined that the administration acted "contrary" to the continuing resolution that Congress created to end the shutdown.
"Defendants must do what the continuing resolution says," the judge wrote in her 27-page order, declaring that the agencies may not "take any further steps to implement or carry out a RIF" through Jan. 30, 2026 — the date to which the continuing resolution stretches — regardless of when the RIF notice was first issued. In addition to reinstating the terminated employees to their prior job statuses, these workers must be given "full back pay."
The federal government shut down on Oct. 1, and, as it had been doing in previous months, the Trump administration moved to lay off federal workers.
The American Federation of Government Employees and other labor unions sued, appealing to the U.S. Northern District of California court for an emergency order "because some agencies have continued to move forward with layoffs … and some agencies have not reinstated employees to their pre-shutdown jobs."
Workers were upset: foreign service workers claimed they weren't given sufficient notice of their terminations, and SBA employees fired during the shutdown received letters on Nov. 17 that their RIF notices were "formally rescinded" — only for those rescission letters to be rescinded the very next day without explanation.
The unions argued that the administration exceeded its authority, ran afoul of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) — the statute that governs federal agency behavior — and violated the Constitution's Appropriations Clause.
The shutdown ended on Nov. 12 when Congress passed a continuing resolution, essentially a temporary fix to fund the government until a more permanent solution can be found. As Illston recounts, "[m]any federal employees whose jobs were on the chopping block took solace: the bill contained a provision that paused further federal agency layoffs through January 30, 2026, and ordered that those federal agency employees who had been laid off during the shutdown be reinstated."
The federal agencies have maintained that they have done nothing wrong. They say that because they submitted RIF notices before the Oct. 1 shutdown, the continuing resolution does not apply, even if the terminations were carried out during the record 43-day shutdown.
But Illston rejected this argument, finding that they displayed a "narrow reading" of the continuing resolution and its specific verbiage: "any reduction in force proposed, noticed, initiated, executed, implemented, or otherwise taken by an Executive Agency between October 1, 2025, and the date of enactment, shall have no force or effect."
The judge also found that the federal workers established that they have been — or would be — harmed beyond merely losing their jobs.
"[T]he Court finds that what is at stake is more than the potential or temporary loss of income of one individual employee. In particular, the loss of health insurance coverage poses a risk that cannot be retroactively repaired through backpay," she wrote, pointing to a fired employee who now has no health insurance for her and her son.
"Other affected employees describe being in treatment for cancer, having chronic medical conditions, and foregoing treatment for themselves and their babies due to lack of insurance coverage," the judge continued. "The declarations also describe employees' challenges in a difficult job market or re-starting careers after decades in government service," she said, pointing to specific fired employees' stories that "demonstrate the harms RIF'd workers face."
In addition to being barred from "taking any action to implement, carry out, or effectuate" RIFs through Jan. 30, 2026, the Trump administration must rescind the notices "implemented or executed" during the shutdown and "give individual notice of this injunction" to relevant employees.
Illston has delayed the injunction from taking effect until Dec. 23 to give the administration time to consider appealing her ruling to a higher court. She set a status conference for Jan. 23, 2026.
Comments