The Trump administration’s plans for reorganizing and reducing the federal workforce may soon become public after a federal appeals court upheld a district court order requiring their disclosure in ongoing litigation.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied the federal government’s request to block an order that required the Trump administration to hand over agency reduction-in-force (RIF) and reorganization plans (ARRPs). Those plans were directed under an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in February.
The executive order said that the heads of federal agencies should lay off employees deemed unessential to agency functions. Since then, tens of thousands of federal employees have lost their jobs.
Documents detailing those plans created by officials must now be produced as part of the discovery process in the case led by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) against the Trump administration, which alleged that actions carried out under the order were unlawful.
The federal government argued that the ARRPs were internal documents protected from release. But the Ninth Circuit ruled the district court was within its rights to order their disclosure, noting the government had skipped the normal rulemaking that would have created a formal record – which courts usually rely on to review whether agencies acted lawfully.
“If there have been ‘departures from settled principles’ in this case … they consist in the sweep of actions undertaken by the government without ordinary processes – actions which the government now seeks to shield from scrutiny by invoking presumptions ordinarily attendant upon the very processes it has ignored,” wrote Judge William Fletcher, writing the order for the court.
“With this case in its current posture, we see no reason to insist that the district court remain ignorant of documents that may or may not eventually be included in an administrative record,” Judge Fletcher added.
The court also said that the government had not shown clear harm in releasing the plans.
It is unclear whether those plans would be made fully public – they would need to be filed in court or introduced at trial – and they may only be viewable by the judges.
The case will, in the meantime, return to the District Court for the Northern District of California for review as to whether the Trump administration’s plans were legal after an unsigned order from the Supreme Court this summer said that AFGE and the other organizations joining the suit would likely not be able to win on the basis that the order itself was illegal.
The justices did not make any evaluation as to whether the plans themselves were legal, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor noting in her dissent that “the plans themselves are not before this Court, at this stage, and we thus have no occasion to consider whether they can and will be carried out consistent with the constraints of law.”