Judge Lets Trump Administration Proceed With Mass Recall Of Usaid Workers Overseas

A federal judge has given the Trump administration the green light to proceed with its plan to put thousands of workers at the U.S. Agency for International Development on leave, including hundreds of people stationed overseas.

In a ruling Friday, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, an appointee of President Donald Trump, ended the hold he put on the plan two weeks ago.

Nichols said initial claims that the recall could put USAID staffers and their families in physical danger or interrupt medical treatment proved to be “overstated” after further scrutiny. And the Washington D.C.-based judge said it wasn’t clear that “potential effects” on employees and people dependent on the aid agency’s activities outweighed the harm caused by hampering the administration’s efforts to realign foreign aid with Trump’s foreign policy agenda.

“The government has made a colorable case that the actions challenged in this case are essential to its policy goals,” Nichols wrote.

The two federal workers’ unions who filed the suit and Oxfam, the international aid organization who joined it, could appeal to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to attempt to get the Trump plan for USAID employees blocked again.

“Today’s ruling is a setback but we remain committed to our USAID members and the valuable work they do,” said Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees. “We will continue to fight the administration’s illegal efforts to dismantle USAID.”

In a statement, an attorney who argued for the unions’ bid to keep the Trump plan at bay did not address the possibility of an appeal, but suggested some further legal steps are imminent. “We will move expeditiously for further and permanent relief to stop the devastation,” said Lauren Bateman with Public Citizen Litigation Group.

Last week, another judge in Washington put a temporary hold on the Trump administration’s efforts to pause foreign-aid grants and contracts overseen by USAID and the State Department.

Individuals who hold personal services contracts with USAID have filed a separate suit, seeking to prevent those contracts from being frozen or terminated. That case was recently reassigned to Nichols, and his ruling Friday suggests he is unlikely to grant that group of workers emergency relief.

Nichols’ decision Friday denying a preliminary injunction in the unions’ suit did not amount to a final ruling that the leave orders or the mass layoffs that are expected to follow are legal. But the judge said Congress set up other legal mechanisms for federal workers to pursue employment disputes and the unions’ case appeared to amount to an end-run around those avenues.

Lawyers for the unions said the sheer volume of employees impacted made it impractical to bring the claims through the boards that oversee the federal civil service. And, they added, those panels were unlikely to act quickly to address the emergency situations some USAID personnel were being thrust into by the administration’s plan.