SCOTUS Agrees Trump Can Resize The Federal Bureaucracy

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily agreed that the Trump administration can move forward with implementing an executive order to resize the federal bureaucracy.

In its 8-1 decision, the justices granted a request from the administration to stay a lower court ruling attempting to block the president and his team from carrying out the policy in question. Signed by President Trump on Feb. 11, the order instructed the heads of federal agencies to “promptly undertake preparations to initiate large-scale reductions in force (RIFs), consistent with applicable law, and to separate from Federal service temporary employees and reemployed annuitants working in areas that will likely be subject to the RIFs.”

According to Tuesday’s order, the temporary stay on the lower court injunction will remain in place “pending the disposition of the appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and disposition of a petition for a writ of certiorari, if such a writ is timely sought.” The stay will terminate if a potential petition from the government to SCOTUS is denied by the high court or if SCOTUS agrees to consider the matter and hands down a judgment in the case.

Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson would not have granted the administration’s request for relief.

In her dissent, the Biden appointee attacked her colleagues for Tuesday’s decision, claiming they lack “the capacity to fully evaluate, much less responsibly override, reasoned lower court factfinding about what this challenged executive action actually entails.”

“I respectfully dissent because, in addition to the Government’s failure to show the exigency or irreparable harm that is required for emergency relief, this Court could not possibly know in this posture whether the Government is likely to succeed on the merits with respect to such a fact-dependent dispute. So it should have left well enough alone,” Jackson wrote.

While joining the majority, Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor authored a separate statement saying that while she agrees with Jackson “that the President cannot restructure federal agencies in a manner inconsistent with congressional mandates,” the plans crafted by federal agencies “are not before this Court, at this stage, and we thus have no occasion to consider whether they can and will be carried out consistent with the constraints of law.”

“I join the Court’s stay because it leaves the District Court free to consider those questions in the first instance,” Sotomayor wrote.