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April 8 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court blocked on Tuesday a judge's order for President Donald Trump's administration to rehire thousands of fired employees, acting in a dispute over his effort to slash the federal workforce and dismantle parts of the government. The court put on hold San Francisco-based U.S. Judge William Alsup's March 13 injunction requiring six federal agencies to reinstate thousands of recently hired probationary employees while litigation challenging the legality of the dismissals continues.

March 26 (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Wednesday refused to pause a judge's ruling requiring the administration of President Donald Trump to reinstate more than 17,000 workers at six agencies who lost their jobs as part of Trump's purge of the federal workforce. A 2-1 panel of the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the Trump administration had failed to establish a federal judge erred by finding that agencies likely could not fire workers at the direction of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the human resources department for the federal government. The Trump administration...

Early on, I followed three recent decisions in other district courts holding that claims brought by public-sector unions concerning federal employee terminations had to be channeled through the Merit Systems Protection Board and/or the Federal Labor Relations Authority and therefore the district court had no subject-matter jurisdiction over those claims, although I accepted subject-matter jurisdiction over claims by the organizational plaintiffs. After further briefing, however, this order holds that the district court does have subject-matter jurisdiction over these claims by public-sector unions and that my earlier ruling to the contrary was mistaken.

The Trump administration filed an emergency appeal Monday to the Supreme Court asking it to halt a recent lower court ruling to rehire some federal workers laid off at federal agencies. The administration said that the ruling should be put on hold because the judge didn't have authority to order 16,000 probationary employees be re-hired, according to The Associated Press. The order was from U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco. The agencies at which the layoffs occurred were departments of Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior and Treasury.

JUST IN: Judge William Alsup declines to stay his order requiring rehiring of probationary employees at 6 federal departments, calls OPM acting chief failure to testify 'violation of this court's order.'

“The words that I give you today should not be taken as some kind of wild and crazy judge in San Francisco has said that the administration cannot engage in a reduction in force. I’m not saying that at all,” Alsup noted as he issued his ruling. “Of course, if he does, it has to comply with the statutory requirements: the Reduction In Force act, the Civil Service Act, the Constitution, maybe other statutes,” the judge continued. “But it can be done.”

A federal judge on Thursday ordered federal agencies to reinstate tens of thousands of probationary employees who were fired amid President Donald Trump’s turbulent effort to drastically shrink the federal bureaucracy. U.S. District Judge William Alsup described the mass firings as a “sham” strategy by the government’s central human resources office to sidestep legal requirements for reducing the federal workforce. Alsup, a San Francisco-based appointee of President Bill Clinton, ordered the Departments of Defense, Treasury, Energy, Agriculture and Veterans Affairs to “immediately” offer all fired probationary employees their jobs back. The Office of Personnel Management, the judge said, had made...

March 13 (Reuters) - A California federal judge on Thursday ordered six U.S. agencies to reinstate thousands of recently-hired employees who were fired as part of President Donald Trump's purge of the federal workforce. The ruling made by U.S. District Judge William Alsup during a hearing in San Francisco applies to the U.S. Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy, Department of Interior and the Treasury Department.

The Trump administration could be sanctioned by a federal judge later this week after lawyers with the Department of Justice advised a federal judge Tuesday evening that they will not make a top administration official available for sworn testimony. U.S. District Judge Charles Alsup had sought to have the acting head of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), Charles Ezell, testify on Thursday about the mass firing of probationary employees. But the DOJ said Tuesday that they would not make Ezell available for testimony. By making Ezell unavailable, DOJ attorneys also withdrew his sworn affidavit, a move that Judge Charles...

In his ruling, Alsup ordered OPM to rescind a January 20 memo and a February 14 email directing agencies to identify probationary employees who are not "mission-critical" and terminate them... "Probationary employees are the lifeblood of our government. They come in at a low level and work their way up. That's how we renew ourselves," said Alsup, an appointee of Democratic former President Bill Clinton.

A federal court on Thursday nixed a Trump-era rule that limited state and tribal authority to block projects that could impact their waters, including pipelines. California Federal Judge William Alsup vacated the rule and sent it back to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for further proceedings. The Clinton appointee's move came after the agency asked the court to remand the issue back to the EPA amid litigation filed by states and environmental groups... ...The now-vacated rule had limited states’ authorities to block projects by giving them a strict one-year time limit to do so before the federal government could decide...

U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco said Levandowski, who was convicted on Tuesday following a March plea agreement, said Levandowski could enter custody once the COVID-19 pandemic has subsided. Alsup said a sentence short of imprisonment would have given “a green light to every future brilliant engineer to steal trade secrets,” comparing what Levandowski took to a “competitor’s game plan.” The 75-year-old judge, who has been involved in Silicon Valley litigation for nearly five decades, described Levandowski’s conviction as the “biggest trade secret crime I have ever seen.” “Billions [of dollars] in the future were at play, and...

A Brooklyn federal judge said in court on Tuesday that he cannot make a decision regarding the status of young undocumented immigrants in the country on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program without considering President Donald Trump’s “incendiary” anti-Latino comments. “The statements that were made during the election cycle were extremely volatile,” said Judge Nicholas Garaufis in court, referring to Trump’s recurring comments that had painted Latinos with a broad negative brush. “This came from the top. This isn’t ordinary,” Garaufis added while DACA recipients in the audience nodded. “It’s not what we see from our leaders, I...

There’s been a huge development in the ongoing struggle to protect the Dreamers, the beneficiaries whose immigration status is protected under DACA. U.S. District Judge William Alsup of in San Francisco just issued an injunction blocking the Trump Administration from ending the program as it announced it would do in September.