The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Monday to block a ruling from a federal judge in California ordering it to rehire thousands of fired federal workers who had been on probationary status.
The emergency application is one of several that appear to be headed to the Supreme Court, a reflection of the scores of lower court rulings that halted administration initiatives. President Trump has denounced the lower court resistance and has called for the Supreme Court to intervene.
Sarah M. Harris, the acting solicitor general, wrote that federal judges have issued more than 40 temporary restraining orders or injunctions blocking administration programs. Many of them, she said, involved rulings that applied nationwide.
She said federal judges had issued 14 such injunctions against the federal government in the first three years of the Biden administration. In February alone, she added, judges issued 15 nationwide injunctions against the Trump administration.
The emergency application filed Monday objected to an injunction from a federal judge in California who earlier this month ordered the administration to reinstate more than 16,000 probationary employees who had been fired. Ms. Harris wrote that the ruling was a stark example of this trend.
“The court’s extraordinary reinstatement order violates the separation of powers, arrogating to a single district court the executive branch’s powers of personnel management on the flimsiest of grounds and the hastiest of timelines,” she wrote. “That is no way to run a government. This court should stop the ongoing assault on the constitutional structure before further damage is wrought.”
In issuing a preliminary injunction, Judge William H. Alsup, of the Northern District of California, acknowledged that “each federal agency has the statutory authority to hire and fire its employees, even at scale, subject to certain safeguards.”
But he wrote that the agency that he said had coordinated the terminations, the Office of Personnel Management, had no authority to hire and fire employees in other agencies.
“Yet that is what happened here — en masse,” he wrote.
His reinstatement order applied to probationary workers fired from the Pentagon, the Treasury, and the Agriculture, Energy, Veterans Affairs and Interior Departments.
A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, declined to pause Judge Alsup’s order while the government pursued an appeal.
A different federal judge, James K. Bredar of the Federal District Court in Maryland, this month also ordered the administration to reinstate federal workers in a case brought by 19 states and the District of Columbia. The Fourth Circuit declined to pause that temporary order on Friday in light of a hearing before Judge Bredar on Wednesday about whether to issue a more lasting injunction.
In a concurring opinion, Judge Allison Jones Rushing of the Fourth Circuit expressed unease with the nationwide scope of Judge Bredar’s order. “The district court lost sight of who the plaintiffs are and what injury they claim when it concluded a nationwide injunction was warranted,” she wrote.
Ms. Harris, the administration’s lawyer, told the justices that the rulings from California and Maryland overlapped but were not identical. In any event, she wrote, the Maryland order lets the administration put reinstated workers on administrative leave, meaning that the California order “inflicts additional practical and administrative burdens.”
