Treasury, HHS Say Court’s Firing Pause Doesn’t Apply to Them (1)

The departments of Treasury and Health and Human Services asserted their terminations of thousands of employees last week during the ongoing government shutdown aren’t barred by a federal judge’s restraining order.

Those workers weren’t represented by the federal unions suing to block the layoffs, so the restraining order doesn’t apply, the human resources heads said among dozens of sworn agency declarations submitted Friday.

The filings offer a first glimpse at how the Trump administration plans to push forward with promised layoffs despite court intervention, as the government shutdown drags into its third week and more agencies run out of contingency funding to keep their doors open.

The Trump administration had fired around 4,100 federal employees across half a dozen agencies on Oct. 10.

San Francisco federal Judge Susan Illston issued a temporary restraining order Wednesday prohibiting the government from engaging in any more mass firings while the case played out. She said at a hearing that the reductions in force are likely “illegal and in excess of authority,” granting a request by the American Federation of Government Employees and other unions.

Illston’s restraining order only applied to workers represented by the unions in the case. Most employees at the Treasury Department are represented by the National Treasury Employees’ Union, which isn’t a plaintiff in the case before Illston but is mulling separate legal action.

HHS and other agencies, however, pulled recognition from their workers’ unions earlier this year in the wake of White House executive orders curbing collective bargaining. President Donald Trump had declared that over two-thirds of the government workforce are exempt from federal-sector labor laws because of their roles in national security.

Those directives spawned a series of separate lawsuits from unions, and the litigation remains pending.

AFGE said in a Thursday filing to Illston that it had learned that the Department of the Interior was preparing layoffs beginning Monday despite the court’s restraining order.

That agency’s chief human resources officer said in a declaration Friday that it was planning 68 terminations, but that it will not proceed for any employee represented by the unions.

Illston, a Clinton appointee who sits on the US District Court for the Northern District of California, had blocked mass firings earlier this year in a separate case brought by AFGE.

The case is AFGE v. OMB, N.D. Cal., No. 3:25-cv-08302, 10/17/25.