The Supreme Court voted 7-2 to stay a district court order that required the Trump administration to rehire about 16,000 probationary employees at six agencies, including USDA, which still faces other orders requiring it to rehire employees.
Two justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, disagreed with the majority.
The lawsuit was brought by federal employee unions and nonprofit groups affected by the layoffs. Alsup found the nonprofits had legal standing to pursue their complaint, but the high court agreed with the government that their “allegations are presently insufficient to support the organizations’ standing.”
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Sotomayor would have denied the application, and Jackson “would have declined to reach the standing question in the context of an application for emergency relief where the issue is pending in the lower courts and the applicants have not demonstrated urgency in the form of interim irreparable harm.”
USDA is still subject to two other orders requiring it to rehire the approximately 5,700 probationary employees — one from the Merit Systems Protection Board and the other from a federal judge in Maryland.
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