A federal judge in Washington, DC, allowed President Donald Trump to continue mass firings of federal bureaucrats after unions asked the layoffs to be temporarily blocked.
A local CBS affiliate reported:
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper acknowledged the struggles the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) and four other unions are facing but that they fail “to establish that it is likely to succeed on the merits because this Court likely lacks subject matter jurisdiction over the claims it asserts. The Court will therefore deny the unions’ motion for a temporary restraining order and, for the same reasons, deny their request for a preliminary injunction.”
The ruling comes as thousands of federal government employees have been laid off due to Trump’s Feb. 11 executive order for “large-scale reductions” in the workforce.
The unions represent hundreds of thousands of federal bureaucrats, who believe that Trump’s downsizing of the federal government conflicts with Congress’s prerogative to fund government agencies through the appropriations process.
Doreen Greenwald, the president of the National Treasury Employees Union, described the court’s decision as a “temporary setback.”
“The lawsuit we filed with our labor union partners will be heard and federal employees will get their day in court to challenge the unlawful mass firings and other attacks on their jobs, their agencies, and their service to the country,” Greenwald continued.
The Trump administration has fired more than 1,000 workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), 3,000 bureaucrats at the U.S. Forest Service, and roughly 6,000 workers at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick has said that President Donald Trump wants to ultimately abolish the IRS and “let all the outsiders pay,” perhaps through what Trump has described as the “External Revenue Service.”
Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick says President Trump’s goal is to abolish the IRS and “let all the outsiders pay.” pic.twitter.com/043iD2vQSX
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) February 20, 2025
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on X @SeanMoran3.
