Appeals court pauses Maryland judge’s order to rehire federal workers

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit on Wednesday paused a Maryland federal judge’s order that directed the Trump administration to rehire thousands of federal probationary workers whose jobs had been terminated across 20 government agencies — finding that the federal government is likely to succeed in its claim that the judge lacks the jurisdiction in the case.

U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar granted a preliminary injunction request last week from 20 Democratic attorneys general who have sued the Trump administration, alleging the government violated federal procedures regulating how mass layoffs are conducted.

The lawsuit alleges that the states and the District of Columbia received no warning before the Trump administration fired more than 20,000 federal probationary workers this year — directly flouting a requirement that federal officials notify affected states at least 60 days before a reduction in force, or RIF, so state officials can stand up emergency unemployment response teams geared toward helping those people.

The Trump administration argued before Bredar, and later a 4th Circuit three-judge panel, that the 20 attorneys general lacked standing in the case because they were a third party to the employee-employer relationship. The states, led by the Maryland Attorney General’s Office, said that argument was irrelevant to their suit because they’re alleging the federal government’s actions harmed the states, not the employees.

But two of the three appeals court judges sided with the Trump administration. Judge Allison Jones Rushing, a Trump appointee, and Judge James Harvie Wilkinson, a Reagan appointee, wrote that they believed the federal government’s arguments were likely to succeed on appeal. Judge DeAndrea G. Benjamin, a Biden appointee, dissented.

It wasn’t immediately clear what will come next for the approximately 24,000 federal probationary workers whom the Trump administration has already rehired. Bredar’s order, which applied to federal probationary workers who lived or worked in the District or one of the 19 states, did not ban the government from once again laying off those workers — it just mandated that those layoffs happen legally.

When asked if the 20 attorneys general planned to appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, a spokesperson for the Maryland Attorney General’s Office, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, said they were “evaluating our next steps.” The White House did not respond to questions about the administration’s plans for the rehired workers but said in a statement that the 4th Circuit was “vindicating the President’s removal powers” by stopping Bredar’s “erroneous order.”

“The Trump Administration continues to rack up legal wins for the American people,” White House assistant press secretary Taylor Rogers said.

Besides Maryland, the lawsuit’s plaintiffs are: D.C., Minnesota, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin.

The 4th Circuit panel’s pause on Bredar’s rehiring order came one day after the Supreme Court ruled on a separate federal lawsuit against the Trump administration related to the firings of federal probationary workers.

In that case, filed in California, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that the government’s human resource agency, the Office of Personnel Management, had no legal authority to direct mass firings at six federal agencies. Alsup, like Bredar, ordered the federal government to rehire those fired workers.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, based in San Francisco, upheld Alsup’s order — prompting the Justice Department to appeal to the high court.

In a 7-2 decision, with liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting, the Supreme Court paused Alsup’s rehiring order in the California case pending a final decision on the government’s appeal before the 9th Circuit.

The high court’s majority decision said that nine plaintiffs in the California case, all nonprofit groups, lacked standing to file the initial lawsuit because they did not have a direct stake in the firings. The affected federal probationary workers are not party to the suit.

In Wednesday’s ruling from the 4th Circuit, the panel majority cited the Supreme Court’s stay in the California case.

But in her dissenting opinion, Benjamin argued that the facts of the Maryland and California cases are different. In the Maryland case, she wrote, the states have clear standing to sue because the government’s failure to give a 60-day notice of mass layoffs directly violated a federal statutory requirement — and caused tangible harm to the states.

That harm, Benjamin noted, included loss of income tax revenue and an extraordinary spike in unemployment claims that states were struggling to process because of their inability to prepare for the onslaught. She also wrote that any alleged harm the government is facing is “self-imposed.”

The 4th Circuit plans to hear oral arguments in the Trump administration’s appeal on May 6.

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• Salvador Rizzo and Justin Jouvenal contributed.