President Trump will aggressively fight a federal judge’s ruling ordering federal agencies to “immediately” reinstate probationary employees fired last month, said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
She criticized the order as “completely absurd” and “entirely unconstitutional” and promised swift legal action against the order.
“Fight back by appealing. Fighting back by using the full weight of the White House Counsel’s Office and our lawyers at the federal government who believe this injunction is entirely unconstitutional, and it is for anybody who has a basic understanding of the law,” Ms. Leavitt told reporters at the White House.
“You cannot have a low-level district court judge filing an injunction to usurp the executive authority of the President of the United States. That is completely absurd,” she said.
She also accused the judges of factoring politics in their decisions.
“And as the executive of the executive branch, the president has the ability to fire or hire and you have these lower-level judges who are trying to block this president’s agenda. It’s very clear,” Ms. Leavitt said.
She noted that in February alone there were 15 injunctions imposed on President Trump’s actions, compared to 14 injunctions during the three years of the Biden administration, citing an April 2024 article in the Harvard Law Review.
“It’s very clear that there are judicial activists throughout our judicial branch who are trying to block this president’s executive authority, we are going to fight back,” Ms. Leavitt said. “All of the indictments, all of these injunctions have always been unconstitutional and unfair. They are led by partisan activists.”
U.S. District Judge William Alsup in California issued the preliminary injunction from the bench on Thursday. The ruling requires the departments of Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior and Treasury to rehire employees. Judge Alsup, an appointee of President Clinton, said he might extend the order to cover other federal agencies at a later time.
The ruling found that the Office of Personnel Management unlawfully directed the agencies to lay off probationary employees, who had been on the job for less than a year.
The judge said the administration’s reasons for the firings were “a sham.” He said the administration fired the employees as part of its plan to reduce the size of the federal government, rather than performance-related issues as the Justice Department argued in federal court.
A second ruling, also Thursday, from U.S. District Judge James Bredar in Maryland, went even further. It temporarily reinstated the workers at 18 federal agencies.
“In this case, the government conducted massive layoffs, but it gave no advance notice. It claims it wasn’t required to because it says it dismissed each one of these thousands of probationary employees for ’performance’ or other individualized reason,” Judge Bredar, an appointee of President Obama, wrote. “On the record before the court, this isn’t true. There were no individualized assessments of employees. They were just all fired. Collectively.”
