Federal Judge in California Temporarily Halts Trump’s Shutdown Firings

WASHINGTON, Oct. 16, 2025 — A federal judge stopped Trump’s planned mass firings, at least for now.

Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco issued a two-week restraining order, having blocked the first wave of more than 4,000 layoffs planned under the administration’s shutdown workforce cuts. She also ordered agencies to submit detailed layoff plans by Friday.

The ruling came in American Federation of Government Employees et al. v. Office of Management and Budget et al., a lawsuit filed by the nation’s two largest federal employee unions. The complaint alleged the administration overstepped its authority by issuing layoff orders during the shutdown without lawful basis or adequate justification.

Illston said the administration had moved “very much ready, fire, aim on most of these programs,” and warned it carried “a human cost — a human cost that cannot be tolerated.” She said she expected evidence would show the effort exceeded the government’s legal authority and broke long-standing precedent on how shutdowns were handled.

The layoffs followed a plan advanced by Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, who led the administration’s effort to shrink the federal workforce. During an interview Wednesday on The Charlie Kirk Show, Vought called the shutdown a “policy opportunity to downsize the federal government” in order to have “less bureaucracy” and a balanced budget.

His guidance told agencies to use the funding lapse to streamline operations by cutting positions labeled nonessential. He cited programs such as the Green New Deal, the Minority Business Development Agency, environmental justice initiatives at the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Under that plan, agencies had begun issuing termination notices to about 4,000 employees, with authority to expand “north of 10,000” if the shutdown persisted. 

During oral arguments, Justice Department attorney Elizabeth Hedges avoided addressing the legality of the layoffs, focusing instead on procedural grounds. She told the district court it was not the “proper forum” and argued that the unexecuted layoffs fell outside the court’s jurisdiction.

Union leaders welcomed the decision. Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said the ruling “halts these unlawful terminations and prevents the administration from further targeting hardworking civil servants during the shutdown.”

Past shutdowns ended in furloughs — temporary unpaid leave — not permanent layoffs, a distinction the administration’s plan threatened to erase. If upheld, Illston’s order would have blocked the largest coordinated federal workforce reduction ever attempted during a shutdown.