Chicago – October 16, 2025
With the federal government shutdown now 2 weeks old and counting, a federal judge in San Francisco temporarily halted the latest wave of layoffs by the Trump administration.
In a hearing on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston said she believed the plaintiffs in the case are likely to prove that what the administration has done — using the lapse in government spending to implement layoffs — is “both illegal and in excess of authority and is arbitrary and capricious.”
The lawsuit was brought by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), which together represent more than 800,000 federal workers.
In a brief filed with the court Tuesday, the unions accuse the Trump administration of “using federal employees as pawns to impose political pressure on the Administration’s perceived opponents in Congress.”
“The harm is now,” the plaintiffs’ attorney Danielle Leonard told the court on Wednesday, describing the emotional trauma that federal employees are enduring.
Illston granted the unions’ request for a temporary restraining order to pause the implementation of layoffs already underway and to block any additional layoff notices from being sent out at more than 30 agencies where the unions represent employees.
