Kicking things off with some good news, on Thursday, two courts ruled that tens of thousands of fired federal probationary employees must be immediately rehired.
First, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that all probationary employees fired from the departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs had to be reinstated because the Office of Personnel Management did not have the authority to terminate them.
The administration did itself no favors by playing games in the case. They gave the court a sworn declaration from Charles Ezell, the acting head of OPM, saying OPM didn’t order the mass termination of probationary employees. Instead, per Ezell, OPM just asked agencies to “engage in a focused review” of their probationary employees and that agencies made their own decisions about who to fire.
Alsup ordered that Ezell appear in court to be cross-examined under oath, a perfectly routine occurrence. The administration refused to produce Ezell and withdrew his declaration so he wouldn’t have to appear. However, Ezell’s declaration was the only evidence the government produced in support of the fiction that OPM just gently suggested to agencies they should review the performance of probationary employees.
Later in the day, U.S. District Judge James Bredar ordered probationary employees reinstated at 18 agencies, including the Departments of Health and Human Services, Education, Homeland Security, and Environmental Protection Agency. Bredar’s restraining order also bars future mass layoffs unless agencies follow all the laws related to reductions in force.
The administration is outraged, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt complaining that “district court judges cannot abuse the power of the entire judiciary to thwart the president’s agenda.” That whole checks and balances thing means that federal court judges absolutely do have the power to use the judiciary to curb unlawful actions of the executive branch, as much as the administration likes to pretend otherwise.
Following court orders is for suckers
Last month, Maryland U.S. District Court Judge Adam Abelson blocked the administration’s executive order terminating funding to programs with diversity initiatives. To get funding, contractors and grant recipients would have needed to sign a contract with a racist little provision where they promised not to do any DEI.
Even a child with a rudimentary understanding of the First Amendment gets that the federal government doesn’t have the right to punish private entities based on the content of their speech, which is exactly what Abelson said.
Did the administration stop requiring all contractors to agree to the racist little provision that promised not to do any DEI? No, it did notdespite that court order.
Instead, they decided the order only covered certain agencies, leaving others, like the State Department, still allowed to force contractors to sign. Earlier this week, Abelson clarified that his order covered all agencies, a thing which the administration has not bothered to tell a ton of contractors.
What random harassing investigations did the administration undertake this week?
When Trump isn’t using government agencies to exact personal revengehe’s making time to open nonsense investigations.
This week, it’s the Federal Communications Commission. Chair Brendan Carr, last seen attacking broadcast networks for not fawning over Trump enough, wrote to Google complaining about YouTube TV not carrying some random Christian network you’ve never heard of. The punchline here is that the FCC doesn’t have oversight of YouTube TV like it does with broadcast networks.
In other news, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is reviewing groups that received federal funding to provide services like temporary housing to migrants. FEMA wants the names of all migrants and is withholding funds during the so-called review. Their allegation? That scrappy groups that provide basic aid to migrants are actually engaged in human smuggling.
Who is the latest to sue the administration?
Farmers! The White House is withholding Inflation Reduction Act funds for clean energy initiatives, leaving farmers awarded USDA grants to install solar panelsbut with no funds to pay for work that had already begun. Five farms sued to force the administration to unfreeze the already-allocated funds.
Fun fact: Roughly 65% of the climate-related farm funding in the IRA was set to go to states where Trump won the 2020 election.
What is Trump asking his pals on the Supreme Court for this week?
Continuing Trump’s pattern of running to the Supreme Court for emergency relief every time he faces an adverse lower court ruling, the administration asked the Court to immediately take up his quest to rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment to exclude birthright citizenship. Trump finds it wildly unfair that three lower courts have issued nationwide injunctions blocking his executive order, because Republicans only like it when nationwide injunctions stop Democrats from doing something.
So, the administration is requesting that the Court let him immediately end birthright citizenship in states which didn’t sue to stop him while litigation proceeds. You’d like to think that the Supreme Court wouldn’t let Trump ignore the Constitution for a while, as a treat, but the conservative justices have proved remarkably willing to give Trump anything he wants.
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