Elon Musk and Trump ordered to stop federal layoffs immediately

A federal judge in San Francisco has granted Donald Trump and Elon Musk the emergency pause they wanted. On Friday, Senior US District Judge Susan Illston issued an order that blocks Trump’s executive plan to lay off thousands of federal workers.This came after a February directive from the White House, signed by Trump, called for a massive shake-up of the federal workforce, one that would shut down agencies and force early retirements across multiple departments. The order was about to go live, but the court stopped things. The ruling stalls the administration’s move to fire workers at Veterans Affairs, the Social Security Administration, State, Treasury, and Transportation, just days before the layoffs were set to begin.Illston said the government can’t avoid the legal steps. She made it clear Trump does have the power to restructure agencies, but only by following the rules, and when it involves large cuts, Congress has to be involved.Elon Musk ordered to stop layoffsAccording to Politico, Illston paused all new layoff notices and stopped any existing ones from being carried out until May 23. This includes notices by the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management. Some agencies were less than two weeks away from starting the firings. The court order now stops every single one of them temporarily.The court named several departments targeted in Trump’s executive order. That includes Energy, Commerce, Health and Human Services, Interior, Labor, Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture, DOGE, AmeriCorps, the National Labor Relations Board, National Science Foundation, and the Small Business Administration.Illston reminded everyone this isn’t the first time Trump tried something like this. In 2017, he made another effort to overhaul the government, but that time, he asked Congress to pass legislation to support it. In her ruling, she wrote, “Nothing prevents the President from requesting this cooperation, as he did in his prior term of office.”The court fight started when major federal worker unions and several nonprofits sued the administration over the February order. They said Trump’s plan to shut down offices and fire workers through voluntary retirement and large-scale reductions-in-force broke federal law and violated the Constitution.Lawyers for Trump claimed the court didn’t have the power to hear the case. They said workers could take their complaints to the Merit Systems Protection Board, the body that handles job disputes in the federal workforce. But that’s where the whole thing fell apart.The post Elon Musk and Trump ordered to stop federal layoffs immediately first appeared on Coinfea.