Protesters hold up posters the day Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) address laid-off federal workers who are staging their weekly sit-in in front of the U.S. Capitol, one day before a partial government shutdown takes effect on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, U.S., September 30, 2025.
Annabelle Gordon | Reuters
A federal judge on Wednesday blocked the Trump administration from laying off federal employees during the ongoing government shutdown.
The order came five days after the administration issued cutback notices to more than 4,000 federal workers.
“The activities undertaken here are contrary to the laws,” Judge Susan Yvonne Illston of U.S. District Court in San Francisco told administration lawyers Wednesday during a hearing in which she issued the temporary restraining order.
“You can’t do that in a country of laws,” Illston said, according to NBC News. “And we have laws here, and the things that are stated here are not in accordance with the law.”
The judge cited comments from President Donald Trump and White House Budget Director Russell Vought that workers were explicitly being fired to target programs favored by Democrats.
Two unions representing tens of thousands of federal workers had asked Illston to block the RIFs.
The Trump administration had warned it would lay off workers during the shutdown, and President Donald Trump has repeatedly said the budget cuts were aimed at “Democratic agencies or initiatives.”
Shortly before Illston issued his order blocking the layoffs, White House Budget Director Russell Vought, during an interview on the “Charlie Kirk Show,” said he expected “more than 10,000” federal jobs to be eliminated as a result of the shutdown.
Illston said the Trump administration has taken advantage of “the gap in government spending and how government operates to assume that all bets are off, that the laws no longer apply to them, and that they can impose the structures they like on the government situation they don’t like,” according to NBC.
The judge also said she believed the unions would be able to prove that the Trump administration’s actions were illegal and “arbitrary and capricious.”
Illston’s order came on the 15th day of the government shutdown, and shortly before, a stopgap funding bill that would end the shutdown failed in the Senate for the ninth time.
Democracy Forward, an advocacy group representing unions in court, welcomed the judge’s order.
“The president seems to think that the government shutdown distracts people from the harmful and lawless actions of his administration, but the American people are holding him accountable, including in the courts,” said Skye Perryman, CEO of Democracy Forward.
“The statements made today by the court make clear that the President’s targeting of federal workers – a move straight out of the Project 2025 playbook – is illegal,” Perryman said.
“Our public servants are doing the people’s work, and messing with their livelihoods is cruel and illegal and a threat to everyone in our nation. »
