RFK Jr.'s Overhaul of HHS Blocked But Workers Won’t Return Now

A federal court’s decision to pause mass firings and restructuring at the US Department of Health and Human Services doesn’t mandate the reinstatement of fired employees, raising uncertainty about what relief was gained and how the government will comply with the order.

The department was dealt a blow Tuesday when a federal judge in Rhode Island ruled in New York v. Kennedy that 19 states and the District of Columbia demonstrated they’re likely to win on their claims that US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. acted unlawfully when he carried out a reduction-in-force and department reorganization.

As part of his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, Kennedy in March launched a massive overhaul of various offices and agencies within the HHS, which included laying off roughly 10% of the department’s workforce. The coalition of states in May challenged that action.

The order temporarily prevents the government from moving forward with those plans, but by not reinstating former employees, it doesn’t fully resolve the harm that states allege they suffered. This includes the sudden cessation of critical services and information sharing due to loss of employees, monetary harms, and damage to surveillance systems at some agencies.

“This is the weirdest thing,” said Jeffrey Grant, former deputy director of operations for consumer information and insurance oversight at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. “If there’s immediate harm, you would think that you would take these people off admin leave.”

“But this isn’t really requiring HHS to do anything,” said Grant, who’s now the president and founder of Schedule F Healthcare Strategies LLC. “The remedy doesn’t alleviate the harm.”

The HHS said it will comply with the order as it’s considering next steps, but it remains to be seen on how the agency will act in accordance.

“The relief included in the injunction ‘includes,’ but is ‘not limited to’ these orders, so it is possible there might be further litigation on the question of whether RIF’d employees must be reinstated,” said Nicholas Handler, an assistant professor at Texas A&M School of Law. “But I don’t read this order as requiring that.”

The preliminary injunction only applied to terminated employees in four different divisions of the HHS: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; the Center for Tobacco Products within the Food and Drug Administration; the Office of Head Start within the Administration for Children and Families and employees of regional offices who work on Head Start matters; and the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation.

The Relief

While the order pauses the department’s firing and restructuring activities, keeping a federal employee from their job could be seen as enforcing the RIF and therefore violating the order, said David Super, an administrative law professor at Georgetown University.

“At a minimum, if I were HHS’s lawyer, I would request the court’s clarification before advising my client that they do not need to bring people back into the office,” Super said.

“The textbook purpose of a preliminary injunction is to restore conditions to what they were prior to the challenged action, and certainly that would be necessary to protect the states against the harms they raised in this litigation.”

The order appears to be a win for states and not necessarily fired federal workers, Super added. The injunction applies to the states and the specific agencies in the suit, not the other thousands of federal workers who were removed from their jobs.

Next Steps

The order requires the HHS to file a status report by July 11, sharing with the court the status of their compliance with the order and providing a copy of all directives that they’ve provided since the opinion.

The court also asks both parties to file a notice with the court by July 11 addressing the way in which, if at all, the US Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. CASA impacts the scope of this order.

The justices in that case curtailed the ability of federal courts to issue universal or national injunctions, ruling that district courts lack the power to enjoin executive branch actions nationwide.

In the meantime, the HHS could take other actions in response to the order.

This includes appealing the preliminary injunction or waiting to move until the Supreme Court responds to an emergency petition in AFGE v. Trump, a case regarding the Trump administration’s efforts to fire thousands of federal workers.

“They may decide that it’s possible to hitch our horse to the case that’s being litigated,” rather than pursuing an appeal on this particular order, said Gabe Menchaca, a former federal workforce strategist for the Office of Management and Budget, now a senior policy analyst at Niskanen Center.

The department, though unlikely, could also go back to the drawing board with its reorganization plan and execute it differently, Menchaca said.

“You could go back and do this the right way, which would involve Congress going through the budget process and actually agreeing on what the appropriate resourcing level would be and then executing RIFs,” he said. “What you can’t do is cut first and figure out the statutory duties later.”

The department may even try to reformulate some of its orders so that they comply with statutory requirements, others say.

“If they are serious about making these cuts, they will likely have to reformulate these orders so that they comply with RIF requirements under federal law,” Handler said.