Some agencies are walking back planned layoffs, Trump administration says

As some federal agencies are moving forward with mass dismissals of employees after receiving the Supreme Court’s blessing to do so, the Trump administration is telling a lower court that some agencies are walking back their planned layoffs. 

Incentivized departures and natural attrition have obviated the need for reductions in force in some cases, Office of Personnel Management Senior Advisor Noah Peters told a federal court in California on Monday. Peters submitted his written testimony to support the Trump administration’s argument that RIF plans are moving targets and should not be made public.

The departments of State, Education and Health and Human Services have all moved forward with mass layoffs since the Supreme Court last week lifted an injunction that had blocked them. State first submitted its RIF notices, while Education and HHS are following through on terminating employees who had previously received them. 

At HHS, laid off employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration’s tobacco office and Head Start remain on the rolls due to an injunction in a separate case brought by a group of states. The rest of the 10,000 employees who faced layoffs received termination notices Monday evening. 

"Given the Supreme Court's ruling, HHS is now permitted to move forward with a portion of its RIF," the department said in its email to impacted staff. "Thank you for your service to the American people." 

One employee noted the emails went to employees' work email, to which many of those impacted—who have been sitting on paid administrative leave since April 1—do not have access, meaning they could not actually view the notice. 

The Supreme Court has struck down two injunctions impact agency RIFs: one aimed solely at Education and a second that prevented mass layoffs at most other major federal agencies. In the latter case, California-based U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, who issued the injunction the high court struck down, is now moving to review the legality of individual agency RIF plans. 

After a request to make those plans public, Illston asked the Trump administration to explain why it does not want to do so. Attorneys for the Justice Department submitted a declaration from Peters, who said the documents are still subject to change and therefore should not be released. While the administration told the Supreme Court there were 40 RIF actions paused at 17 agencies due to the injunction, Peters said that number was actually 70 actions at 19 agencies. 

That figure was derived from the number of requests agencies made to OPM to change how employees are categorized for the purposes of layoffs, Peters said. Submissions had been made by the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, HHS, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Labor, State, Transportation and Treasury, as well as AmeriCorps, the Environmental Protection Agency, General Services Administration, Small Business Administration, Social Security Administration, National Science Foundation and OPM itself.

Agencies are now walking some of those back, Peters explained. 

“I have been informed in the past week that several agencies are now not planning to proceed with several of the RIFs that had been planned at other times,” he said, adding those agencies are reassessing staffing needs following the departure of significant chunks of their workforces through voluntary means. 

Peters did not suggest agencies have canceled their RIF plans altogether, but instead only some of them. He did not specify which agencies have altered their plans and OPM did not respond to a request for more information. 

The Veterans Affairs Department, not one of the agencies Peters listed, recently announced it would cut only 30,000 workers instead of the 80,000 it originally planned to let go and would not have to rely on RIFs to do so.  

OPM and the Office of Management and Budget issued a memorandum in February requiring agencies to submit reorganization and RIF plans. The resulting materials are “living documents that are always subject to change as agency needs and circumstances may dictate, or simply due to an agency rethinking or reconsidering an issue,” Peters said. 

In its larger argument, the Trump administration told the court that if it does order the disclosure of the RIF plans, the disclosures should be limited to the agencies Peters noted and allow for redactions. 

Last week, Illston said that final decisions on the RIFs must have been made if her injunction had paused them from taking effect. She added the court was “not inclined” to allow for significant redactions.