A federal judge in San Francisco will weigh Tuesday whether to indefinitely halt the Trump administration's mass layoffs of federal employees during the government shutdown.
The hearing comes almost two weeks after U.S. District Judge Susan Illston temporarily paused thousands of layoffs, known as RIFs, or reductions-in-force, at agencies where the federal employee unions that brought the lawsuit, including the American Federation of Government Employees, have members or bargaining units.
The Trump administration has pushed back. It's argued first, that the court lacks jurisdiction to hear the case, and second, that the unions have failed to show that they are suffering irreparable harm as a result of the administration's actions.
In the days since Illston first issued her temporary restraining order, the two sides have haggled over its scope. The Trump administration initially determined it did not apply to most of the roughly 4,000 federal employees who have received layoff notices since the government shutdown began on Oct. 1, including those working for the Treasury Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Illston later modified the order, including by broadening it to cover six additional unions.
Whatever comes of President Trump's latest attempts to slash the federal workforce, it's clear that the administration's modus operandi — taking sweeping and legally questionable actions to swiftly eliminate jobs — is taking a toll on workers, as is evidenced by some of the testimonies submitted to the court as part of a lawsuit.
For many of those receiving layoff notices amid the shutdown, it's not the first time the Trump administration has tried to fire them.
In a declaration filed in court, Mayra Medrano, a program analyst with the Commerce Department's Minority Business Development Agency and a member of the National Federation of Federal Employees, writes that she first received a RIF notice in April with an effective termination date of May 9 before being reinstated by court order in June.
"The constant threat of being fired, which has persisted for months, has caused me tremendous physical and mental distress," she writes, elaborating that she experienced a severe stress-induced seizure while on administrative leave this spring.
She writes that she now feels as if she's reliving that nightmare.
"Receiving a RIF notice during the government shutdown, on top of the previous RIF, has been traumatic and it will have a lasting impact on my health," she writes. "It doesn't feel as though the administration thought about or cared about that long-lasting impact."
Medrano did not respond to NPR's request for further comment.
In the initial hearing in the case two weeks ago, the plaintiffs' attorney Danielle Leonard sought to draw attention to the emotional trauma that federal workers are experiencing, pointing to comments made by White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought before Trump's re-election.
In a private speech in 2023 surfaced by ProPublica, Vought, who is now largely seen as the force behind the shutdown layoffs, said he wanted government bureaucrats to be "traumatically affected" to the point of not wanting to go to work.
"That's exactly what they are doing," Leonard told the court.
In an interview with The Charlie Kirk Show before Illston blocked the layoffs, Vought said more than 10,000 people could receive RIF notices during the shutdown.
Still, that amounts to only a fraction of the federal employees who have been fired since Trump returned to the White House in January.
Back in August, Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor said roughly 300,000 federal workers would be gone from the government by the end of the year, noting that 80% of those departures were voluntary.
That means even prior to the shutdown, roughly 60,000 federal workers faced involuntary separation, according to Kupor's estimates.
Another 154,000 workers took the Trump administration's "Fork in the Road" buyout offer, according to OPM. Many who took the buyout told NPR they feared they would be fired if they didn't leave.
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