The US Capitol in Washington, DC, US, on Monday, Oct. 13, 2025.
Anna Rose Layden | Bloomberg | Getty Images
A federal judge on Wednesday blocked the Trump administration, for now, from firing federal workers during the ongoing government shutdown.
The order came five days after the administration issued reduction-in-force notifications to more than 4,000 federal workers.
“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 temporary restraining order.
“You can’t do this in a nation of laws,” Illston said, according to NBC News.
Two unions representing tens of thousands of federal workers had asked Illston to block the RIFs. The Trump administration had warned that it would lay off workers during the shutdown, and President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that the cuts were aimed at “Democrat agencies” or initiatives.
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.”
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, CEOof 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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