Trump and Elon Musk get court order to stop federal layoffs immediately

A federal judge in San Francisco has granted Donald Trump and Elon Musk the emergency pause they wanted. On Friday, Senior US District Judge Susan Illston issued a court order that blocks Trump’s executive plan to lay off thousands of federal workers.

This came after a February directive from the White House, signed by Trump, called for a massive shake-up of the federal workforce, one that would shut down agencies and force early retirements across multiple departments. The order was about to go live, but the court just hit the brakes—hard.

The ruling stalls the administration’s move to fire workers at Veterans Affairs, the Social Security Administration, State, Treasury, and Transportation, just days before the layoffs were set to begin. Illston said the government can’t skip the legal steps. She made it clear Trump does have the power to restructure agencies, but only by following the rules, and when it involves large cuts, Congress has to be involved.

Judge says layoffs can’t start until May 23

According to Politico, Illston froze all new layoff notices and stopped any existing ones from being carried out until May 23. This includes notices by the Office of Management and Budget and Office of Personnel Management.

Some agencies were less than two weeks away from starting the firings. The court order now stops every single one of them—at least temporarily.

The court named several departments targeted in Trump’s executive order. That includes Energy, Commerce, Health and Human Services, Interior, Labor, Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture, DOGE, AmeriCorps, the National Labor Relations Board, National Science Foundation, and the Small Business Administration.

During the Friday hearing, Illston said the executive order looked like it was written to dodge all the slow parts of the law. She didn’t hold back on why she believed the plan moved the way it did. “I think that is probably why the executive order said what it said, because there is some impatience with how slow that process can be,” she told the courtroom. “But if the statutes provide for the process, then the process needs to be followed.”

Illston reminded everyone this isn’t the first time Trump tried something like this. In 2017, he made another effort to overhaul the government, but that time, he asked Congress to pass legislation to support it. In her ruling, she wrote, “Nothing prevents the President from requesting this cooperation — as he did in his prior term of office.”

Unions and nonprofits push back against Trump’s plan

The court fight started when major federal worker unions and several nonprofits sued the administration over the February order. They said Trump’s plan to shut down offices and fire workers through voluntary retirement and large-scale reductions-in-force broke federal law and violated the Constitution.

They argued the White House ignored the requirement to provide 60 days’ notice, assess veteran status, and check if workers could be reassigned instead of fired.

Lawyers for Trump claimed the court didn’t have the power to hear the case. They said workers could take their complaints to the Merit Systems Protection Board, the body that handles job disputes in the federal workforce. But that’s where the whole thing fell apart.

Illston pointed out that the Merit Systems Protection Board doesn’t have enough people to make decisions. She also said the Trump administration hadn’t told Congress or the unions anything about how the layoffs would be done.

Cryptopolitan Academy: Coming Soon - A New Way to Earn Passive Income with DeFi in 2025. Learn More