Demonstrators hold posters on the day Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) speak to fired federal workers holding their weekly sit-in outside the U.S. Capitol a day before a partial government shutdown is set to take effect on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., Sept. 30, 2025.
Annabelle Gordon | Reuters
A federal judge on Wednesday blocked the Trump administration, for now, from firing federal workers during the ongoing government shutdown.
The temporary restraining order came five days after the administration issued reduction-in-force notifications to more than 4,000 federal workers.
The order blocks the Trump administration from taking any action to follow through with those workers’ termination, or to issue RIFs to other federal employees protected by two unions that filed a lawsuit to prevent the firings.
“The activities that are being undertaken here are contrary to the laws,” San Francisco U.S. District Court Judge Susan Yvonne Illston told lawyers for the administration on Wednesday at a hearing where she issued the TRO.
“You can’t do this in a nation of laws,” Illston said, according to NBC News. “And we have laws here, and the things that are being articulated here are not within the law.”
The judge cited comments by President Donald Trump and White House Budget Director Russell Vought that have indicated the workers were being laid off explicitly to target programs favored by Democrats.
In a written order issued later Wednesday, Illston called the firings during a shutdown “unprecedented.”
“It is also far from normal for an administration to fire line-level civilian employees during a
government shutdown as a way to punish the opposing political party,” Illston wrote.
“But this is precisely what President Trump has announced he is doing, by taking to social media on the second day of the shutdown to post: ‘I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent. I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.'”
Two unions representing tens of thousands of federal workers had asked Illston to block the RIFs, and the order Illston issued applies to any employee represented by those unions. She scheduled a hearing for Oct. 28 on the unions’ request for a preliminary injunction that would continue to block the Trump administration from restarting the RIFs. The unions are the American Federation of Government Employees, and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
The Trump administration had warned that it would lay off workers during the shutdown, and Trump has repeatedly said that the cuts were aimed at “Democrat agencies” or initiatives.
Shortly before Illston issued her order blocking layoffs, Vought, during an interview on “The Charlie Kirk Show,” said that he expected that “north of 10,000” federal jobs would be cut because of their shutdown.
Illston said that the Trump administration took “advantage of the lapse in government spending and government functioning to assume that all bets are off, the laws don’t apply to them anymore, and they can impose the structures that they like on the government situation that they don’t like,” according to NBC.
The judge also said that she believed the unions would be able to prove that the Trump administration’s actions were illegal and “arbitrary and capricious.”
Illston’s order came on the 15th day of the government shutdown, and shortly before a stopgap funding bill that would end the shutdown failed in the Senate for the ninth time.
Democracy Forward, an advocacy group representing the unions in court, praised the judge’s order.
“The president seems to think his government shutdown is distracting people from the harmful and lawlessness actions of his administration, but the American people are holding him accountable, including in the courts,” said Skye Perryman, CEO of Democracy Forward.
“The statements today by the court make clear that the President’s targeting of federal workers — a move straight out of Project 2025’s playbook — is unlawful,” Perryman said.
“Our civil servants do the work of the people, and playing games with their livelihoods is cruel and unlawful and a threat to everyone in our nation.”
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