Justice Department attorneys litigating the layoff cases in federal court are furloughed due to the shutdown.

Justice Department attorneys litigating the layoff cases in federal court are furloughed due to the shutdown. Samuel Corum/Getty Images

Shutdown freezes earlier job-cut battles as Trump signals fresh layoffs

Employees involved in litigation are caught up in furloughs, though group says Trump is seeking to delay accountability.

The Trump administration is continuing to promise widespread layoffs across the federal workforce as a result of the government shutdown, even as employees previously impacted by mandatory staffing cuts are still fighting back against their terminations. 

The White House has said the new round of shutdown layoffs will hit in the coming days. In the meantime, the effort to rollback the previous layoffs are running into a new obstacle: the Justice Department attorneys litigating the cases in federal court are furloughed due to the shutdown. 

As a result, the Trump administration has asked in multiple cases for a delay in proceedings. A group of states suing the Education Department over its layoffs—which the Supreme Court has, for now, allowed to move forward—has agreed to an administrative stay on the case, and the judge has signed off on the pause. 

“Absent an appropriation, Department of Justice attorneys and employees of the federal defendants are prohibited from working, even on a voluntary basis,” the department said in a filing on Wednesday. 

Under the judge’s order, all deadlines on the case will be pushed back equal to the number of days that the shutdown drags on. 

The administration has made a similar request in a larger case seeking to block all large-scale reductions in force across the government. The Supreme Court also overturned an initial injunction on that case, but a district judge is now requiring the administration to turn over an array of documents to determine the legality of each agency’s RIF plan. 

“Counsel for the government also notes that given the posture of this case, substantial work by numerous employees from each of the 25 defendant agencies is necessary, and if this motion is denied, the work needed from those agencies to meet current deadlines and obligations may not be possible,” the Justice attorneys said in light of the shutdown. 

The plaintiffs in the case, made up of federal employee unions and advocacy groups, contested the motion for a delay and the judge has not yet issued a ruling. 

“The Trump-Vance administration would like nothing more than to use their self-made crisis of a government shutdown as a cover to pause the accountability they face in the federal courts,” said Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, which helped bring the lawsuit. “The federal courts in this nation have been ruling against the administration and its harmful policies in order to protect people and their Constitutional rights. It is imperative that the most pressing litigation currently happening continues to move forward, regardless of a government shutdown.”

The Trump administration has pursued a pause in dozens of cases in which it is facing lawsuits, including one challenging the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development. The chief judge for the U.S. Court for the District of Columbia issued a blanket stay on all civil proceedings before it involving federal agencies. 

Trump on Thursday reiterated his threat for a renewed round of layoffs, saying he was meeting with Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought to finalize the plan. The administration has insisted the RIFs are necessary due to the shutdown, though there is no direct connection between layoffs and funding lapses. Instead, agencies temporarily furlough portions of their workforces until the government reopens. The Trump administration is also pursuing that approach, but said permanent job cuts would lead to additional savings that would enable it to provide more essential services during the shutdown.

Trump suggested the agencies at which he would institute unilateral cuts were a “political scam,” though he suggested he had not yet decided whether the reductions would be temporary or permanent. By failing to vote for a stopgap spending bill that would have averted a shutdown, he said, Democrats “gave me this unprecedented opportunity.” 

To date, only the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has instituted RIFs since the shutdown began. It cut around 1% of its workforce. 

“Two days, imminent, very soon,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Wednesday in describing the timing of the forthcoming layoffs. 

She added President Trump has directed his entire cabinet to develop layoff plans and the Office of Management and Budget is working with agencies “across the board to identify where cuts can be made.”

Government Executive previously reported that, unrelated to the shutdown, the Interior Department was taking steps to implement layoffs in October. Democracy Forward has joined the American Federation of Government Employees in suing the Trump administration over potential shutdown layoffs, arguing Trump and Vought had overstepped their legal authorities in ordering the RIFs.

Congress was not in session on Thursday due the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur, but will take new votes attempting to end the shutdown on Friday. 

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