Judge stalls Trump’s mass government layoffs

A federal judge out of San Francisco issued a preliminary injunction Thursday night, extending a pause on President Donald Trump’s executive order that triggered mass government layoffs. The president can set priorities for executive agency leaders to implement, but Congress is the only one to assign duties that a federal agency must statutorily carry out, according to U.S. District Judge Susan Illston’s order. The president can’t initiate a large-scale reorganization within the executive branch without partnering with Congress because it’s a blatant disregard for constitutional mandates, she added. The Thursday order extended Illston’s previously issued two-week injunction on federal agency layoffs and reorganization.

Trump issued an executive order in February calling all government agencies to reduce waste and insularity, which in turn triggered mass firings and major reorganization. The largest federal workers union, American Federation of Government Employees, filed the lawsuit in late April, alongside nearly a dozen non-profit groups and several local governments in California, Texas, and Illinois.

Didn’t a different judge already stop the layoffs on Thursday? U.S. District Judge Myong Joun issued a similar injunction earlier on Thursday, reversing the mass layoffs in the Department of Education. Joun’s injunction came from a different case consolidated out of Massachusetts and only addressed Trump’s March order calling for the dismantling of the Education Department. The ruling came out of a case that consolidated two lawsuits against the administration, one posed by a group of state attorneys general and the other from a coalition of education groups.

Dig deeper: Read my Thursday report for more background on the separate injunction on Trump’s Education Department order.