By John Kruzel
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday cleared the way for Donald Trump‘s administration to pursue mass government job cuts and the sweeping downsizing of numerous agencies, a decision that could lead to tens of thousands of layoffs while dramatically reshaping the federal bureaucracy.
At Trump’s direction, the administration has assembled plans to reduce staff at the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Health and Human Services, State, Treasury, Veterans Affairs and more than a dozen other agencies.
In a brief unsigned order on Tuesday, the court said the Trump administration was likely to succeed in its argument that his executive actions calling on agencies to formulate layoff plans were legal.
The decision is the latest win for Trump’s broader efforts to consolidate power in the executive branch. The Supreme Court has sided with Trump in several cases on an emergency basis since he returned to office in January, including clearing the way for implementation of some of his hardline immigration policies.
In Tuesday’s decision, the court said it was not assessing the legality of any specific layoff plans at federal agencies, which could still face other legal challenges on a number of grounds.
A group of unions, nonprofits and local governments that sued to block the administration’s mass layoffs said the ruling “dealt a serious blow to our democracy and puts services that the American people rely on in grave jeopardy.”
The plaintiffs said in a statement that they would “continue to fight on behalf of the communities we represent.”
A Reuters/Ipsos poll in April found that Americans narrowly favored Trump’s campaign to downsize the federal government, with about 56% saying they supported the effort and 40% opposed. Their views broke down along party lines, with 89% of Republicans but just 26% of Democrats supportive.
The Supreme Court’s order on Tuesday lifted San Francisco-based U.S. District Judge Susan Illston’s May 22 order that had blocked large-scale federal layoffs while the case proceeded.
White House spokesperson Harrison Fields welcomed the court’s action, calling it a “definitive victory for the president and his administration” that reinforced Trump’s authority to implement “efficiency across the federal government.”
Upon taking office in January, Trump launched a massive campaign to cut the 2.3-million strong federal civilian workforce, led by billionaire Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency.
DOGE CUTS
Musk and his mostly young lieutenants immediately moved into key government agencies, fired workers, gained access to government computer systems and virtually shuttered two agencies – the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Trump and Musk said the bloated federal bureaucracy needed to be downsized. Federal workers unions and most Democrats say the cuts so far, and the plans for further mass layoffs, have been carried out haphazardly, leading to chaos inside many agencies and threatening important public services such as the processing of Social Security claims.
By late April, about 100 days into the effort, the government overhaul had resulted in the firing, resignations and early retirements of 260,000 civil servants, according to a Reuters tally.
Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the sole member of the nine-person court to publicly dissent from Tuesday’s decision, criticizing the “court’s demonstrated enthusiasm for greenlighting this president’s legally dubious actions in an emergency posture.”
Illston had ruled that Trump exceeded his authority in ordering the government downsizing.
“As history demonstrates, the president may broadly restructure federal agencies only when authorized by Congress,” Illston wrote.
She had blocked the agencies from carrying out mass layoffs and limited their ability to cut or overhaul federal programs. Illston also ordered the reinstatement of workers who had lost their jobs, though she delayed implementing this portion of her ruling while the appeals process plays out.
(Reporting by John Kruzel; Additional reporting by Andrew Chung, Courtney Rozen, Tim Reid, Nandita Bose and Joseph Ax; Editing by Will Dunham, Noeleen Walder and Cynthia Osterman)
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