Washington: A federal judge in Washington has allowed President Donald Trump’s mass firings of federal workers to move forward.
US District Judge Christopher Cooper decided Thursday he could not grant a motion from unions representing the workers to temporarily block the layoffs. He found that their complaint amounted to an employment dispute and must follow a different process outlined in federal employment law.
Cooper acknowledged that the Republican president’s second term “has been defined by an onslaught of executive actions that have caused, some say by design, disruption and even chaos in widespread quarters of American society.”
But Cooper, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, a Democrat, wrote that judges are “duty-bound to decide legal issues based on even-handed application of law and precedent — no matter the identity of the litigants or, regrettably at times, the consequences of their rulings for average people.”
The ruling comes as thousands of federal government employees have been shown the door during in the first month of Trump’s second administration.
The administration argued in court the unions failed to show that they were facing the kind of irreparable, immediate harm that would justify an emergency order
stopping layoffs. Agencies