A coalition of nearly two dozen unions, local governments and nonprofit groups filed suit against the Trump administration in federal court Monday, alleging that it’s in the midst of a broad, unconstitutional and secretive reorganization of the federal government.
The case, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, specifically challenges the actions various federal officials have taken in response to an executive order President Trump issued in February that called for a governmentwide “workforce optimization” led by the Department of Government Efficiency.
In that order, Trump told agency heads to start preparing large-scale reductions in force along with agency reorganization plans that were due to the White House 30 days after the EO’s issuance on Feb. 11.
The plaintiffs claim that even though those reorganization plans have not been made available to the public or the unions who represent federal workers, agencies have nonetheless begun implementing a “radical transformation and downsizing of the federal government” without the legal authority to do so.
Alleged constitutional violation
The order “does not simply suggest or encourage agencies to exercise their own statutory authority to effectuate a government-wide reorganization: it orders them to act according to the president’s vision, regardless of that statutory authority,” the complaint alleges. “At no point has Congress authorized President Trump’s actions with respect to the federal agencies that Congress created in an exercise of its Article I legislative authority, which the Constitution grants to Congress, not to the president.”
Although other lawsuits have challenged the administration’s unilateral dismantling of individual agencies such as USAID, and others have contested decisions to fire federal workers en-masse, the suit is among the first to challenge the constitutionality of the White House and DOGE’s broader efforts to downsize the government writ large.
The plaintiffs contend that in addition to usurping Congress’s power to establish and disestablish agencies, the administration’s actions violate federal statutes including “arbitrary and capricious” violations of the Administrative Procedure Act, claiming that DOGE, the Office of Management and Budget and Office of Personnel Management have no authority to order agencies to eliminate programs or RIF employees.
“The impacted agencies themselves do not have the authority to do the president’s unconstitutional bidding, under the terms set by the president rather than by Congress,” they wrote in Monday’s complaint. “Over and over, newly appointed agency heads have explained that they are reorganizing, eliminating programs, and cutting thousands upon thousands of jobs, because the president directed them to and because DOGE told them how much and what to cut.”
Among the plaintiffs in the new lawsuit are the American Federation of Government Employees, the Service Employees International Union, the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, Vote Vets, and several local governments, including the cities of Baltimore and Chicago and King County (Washington) and Santa Clara County (California).
Similar plaintiffs in probationary employee case
Many of the same plaintiffs — represented by some of the same attorneys in the same San Francisco courtroom — have had mixed success in a separate lawsuit that challenged the legality of the administration’s mass terminations of federal employees who were on their probationary periods.
In that case, the district court initially found that OPM violated federal law by ordering agencies to terminate their probationary workers, but the Supreme Court blocked a temporary restraining order that had ordered agencies to rehire those workers, saying the nonprofit plantiffs in the case — whose status the earlier ruling had hinged on — had not shown the requisite standing to sue over the terminations.
Later, the same judge, William Alsup, issued a narrower preliminary injunctionfinding that additional plantiffs, including unions, do have standing. The April 18 injunction prohibits agencies from firing employees at OPM’s direction, but allows them to terminate workers if the decision is based on “an individualized evaluation of that employee’s performance or fitness.”
The Trump administration is now appealing that ruling to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. In previous filings, Justice Department attorneys have defended the terminations, saying OPM’s direction on firing probationary workers was merely “guidance,” not a directive.
The court’s orders regarding the workforce are “a remarkable intrusion into the operation of the Executive Branch and into the functioning of each of these agencies as they seek to implement the president’s workforce optimization initiative,” government attorneys wrote in a March 14 filing in the probationary employees case. “Indeed, as a practical matter, the requirement for agencies to reinstate employees puts significant burdens on agencies, including the administrative burdens of having to onboard reinstated employees while leaving supervisors in a murky state of affairs should an appellate court reverse this court’s preliminary injunction. In precluding OPM from providing guidance to agencies on personnel matters, the court effectively binds the agency from exercising its assigned role in the Executive Branch.”
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