The Supreme Court stayed a lower district court’s preliminary injunction that required government agencies to reinstate terminated probationary employees and barred the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) from directing further firings and issuing workforce reduction guidance.
The Court’s April 8 order in a case between OPM and a group of government labor unions and related nonprofit organizations (No. 24A904) stays the March 13 preliminary injunction by U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California Judge William H. Alsup.
According to the brief order posted directly in the docket on the Court’s website, the stay is “pending the disposition of the appeal” in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and disposition of a timely filed cert petition. “In the event certiorari is granted, the stay shall terminate upon the sending down of the judgment of this Court,” read the order.
“The District Court’s injunction was based solely on the allegations of the nine non-profit-organization plaintiffs in this case,” the Court explained. “But under established law, those allegations are presently insufficient to support the organizations’ standing.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor would have denied OPM’s motion to stay, which was filed March 24 and denied by the 9th Circuit in a 2-1 split. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson would not have touched on the standing issue “in the context of an application for emergency relief where the issue is pending in the lower courts and the applicants have not demonstrated urgency in the form of interim irreparable harm,” the order indicated.
A group of former government officials had urged the Court to deny OPM’s stay motion in an amicus brief. When Alsup’s preliminary injunction was in effect, government agencies brought back at least 16,000 probationary employees terminated in February, but they were placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of the suit.
The parties met again at an April 9 hearing in the district court. Alsup questioned if those reinstated employees were to be fired again by their respective agencies. “Can we really say that that is the direct result of OPM’s unlawful — clearly unlawful — directive back in February?” With the Court’s stay now in place, the question for the district judge became: “How long would they be entitled to be employed and the agency could not fire them?”
Counsel for the plaintiff organizations responded in saying “the taint of the original sin does dissipate at some point, but we are not there yet.” OPM has not provided evidence, the petitioners’ side argued, that the agencies ever acted independently in the first place in carrying out the en masse wave of terminations. Moreso, some agencies like the Treasury Department have demonstrated “substantial noncompliance” with the preliminary injunction before it was stayed, although other agencies made more of a concerted effort to bring back fired workers, with documentation.
Alsup expressed frustration that the organizations have not produced a list of member employees directly impacted by OPM’s directive. The government’s counsel cast doubt over their standing, saying it is unclear what their challenge is at this point in the proceedings.
“If they’re not relying on their own injury but are relying on injuries to their members, they need to either identify the members and explain what concrete harms those members suffered, or they need to demonstrate that their entire membership suffered a sufficient Article III injury,” the government’s attorney told the judge.
The parties exchanged blame over why a list of fired employees from the petitioner organizations has not yet been provided to the judge, who was less interested in sussing out which side was ultimately responsible. Alsup gave the parties until 5 p.m. Friday to provide the list in accordance with the Administrative Procedure Act.
In a statement provided to Checkpoint, the organizations said the Supreme Court’s stay order “is deeply disappointing but is only a momentary pause in our efforts to enforce the trial court’s orders and hold the federal government accountable.”
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