President Donald Trump speaks before a lunch with Ukraine”s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Cabinet Room of the White House, Friday, Oct. 17, 2025, in Washington (AP Photo/Alex Brandon).
A federal judge in San Francisco on Friday chided the Trump administration for continuing to flout its obligations under a restraining order barring the government from moving forward with a series of pre-planned layoffs during the government shutdown.
For the second time this week, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, a Bill Clinton appointee, tore into U.S. Department of Justice attorneys over so-called reductions in force (RIFs) aimed at slashing federal payrolls.
The RIFs were first proposed late last month, before the shutdown began, the plaintiffs in the litigation pointed out in their 31-page complaint filed on Sept. 30 in the Northern District of California.
Friday’s hearing was of the emergency type. The proceedings were hastily requested by the plaintiffs – and called for by the judge – after the government was alleged to be planning to violate a restraining order issued earlier this week blocking the issuance of any such RIFs.
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During the hearing, an attorney for the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents thousands of federal workers assigned to various federal agencies, said the Trump administration was misinterpreting the temporary restraining order (TRO).
“We think that they are overly narrowly interpreting the scope of the TRO and ignoring some of the language,” lawyer Danielle Leonard said, according to a courtroom report by Federal News Network, a Washington, D.C.-based radio station. “The TRO says ‘bargaining units or members,’ and there’s a reason for that language. The unions represent members regardless of whether they are in bargaining units, including at the agencies like HHS, where the government has tried to eliminate their right to have a bargaining unit.”
To hear the government tell it, President Donald Trump’s executive order-based efforts to end collective bargaining rights for thousands of federal employees in “national security“-adjacent jobs necessarily limited the reach of the court’s order in the present case.
On Friday, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) filed a declaration with the court expressing its intent to comply with the TRO – saying the agency believed recent anti-union efforts meant no-longer-recognized unions would not be covered by the anti-RIF order.
Not so, said the plaintiffs.
And the judge agreed with the unions.
“If an individual person is an employee of the defendant agencies and is a member of a plaintiff union…they can’t be RIFed,” Illston said on Friday. “That’s what I thought I said and what I’m trying to say. That would be contrary to what HHS perhaps thought I meant, but that’s what I do mean.”
Still, in an effort for increased clarity – and for increased labor force protections – the court formally expanded the TRO to cover employees represented by the National Federation of Federal Employees, the Service Employees International Union, and the National Association of Government Employees. Before Friday, the order expressly covered members of the AFGE and the American Federation of State, County And Municipal Employees.
The hearing owed its genesis to claims that the Department of the Interior (DOI) intended to carry out a substantial number of RIFs on Monday, Oct. 20. In their own declaration, DOI confirmed they were planning on “imminently abolishing positions in 68 competitive areas” spanning nearly 10,000 employees total and some 2,500 or so union members.
Still, the agency expressed their belief such firings would be compliant with the TRO because those firings had been planned for months – and were not based on the salience of the government shutdown.
But Illston was not having it.
“It is not complicated,” the judge lectured. “During this time, these agencies should not be doing RIFs of the protected folks that we’re talking about that have been enjoined.”
The underlying litigation was filed by the labor union plaintiffs after the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a memo citing the “opportunity” to reduce agency workforces during the government shutdown. That memo, issued days before the shutdown began, signaled that any such layoffs appeared to be pre-planned and led the court to consider them political in nature.
“It’s really ready, fire, aim on most of these programs,” Illston opined earlier this week. “It’s a human cost that cannot be tolerated.”
Late Friday, the court issued a clarified TRO.
“Because Defendants expressed an inaccurate interpretation of the TRO provisions, the Court further clarifies,” the order reads in part. “The reference to issuance of RIF notices ‘during or because of the federal government shutdown’ or ‘during a shutdown’ applies to any RIF notices issued on or after October 1, 2025 and before the end of the federal government shutdown, regardless of whether that RIF was planned to occur independent of or before the shutdown.”
