Judge declines to immediately spare USAID contractors from firings

A federal judge on Thursday declined to immediately spare U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) contractors from mass firings, letting move forward a core part of the Trump administration’s effort to dismantle the agency.

U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols said USAID’s personal services contractors failed to prove they face irreparable harm and a likelihood of success on the merits, denying their motion for a temporary restraining order that would have returned fired contractors to employment and allowed them to resume work.

The judge said any harm the contractors face is “directly traceable” to changes the government has made to their contracts, suggesting relief should be sought through a different avenue.

The Personal Services Contractor Association, an advocacy group for U.S. personal services contractors, sued the Trump administration last month to insulate the contractors from efforts to tear down the agency.

In court filings, lawyers for the contractors said notices of contract termination had been distributed to “possibly hundreds” of the roughly 1,110 contractors who work for USAID, some 46 percent of whom work overseas.

“The destruction of USAID is now imminent,” said Carolyn Shapiro, a lawyer for the challengers, during a hearing on the matter Wednesday.

The contractors urged the judge to come to a “different conclusion” than he had in a separate case involving unions representing USAID employees, who sued over the shutdown of the agency’s operations.

In that case, Nichols initially granted a temporary restraining order staving off a purge of USAID employees but ultimately dissolved the order after finding the unions’ initial assertions of harm were “overstated,” declining to grant further relief.

Shapiro sought to steer the judge away from the individual harms USAID contractors might face and instead argued that they faced irreparable harm from the government’s “structurally unconstitutional decision-making.”

She said refusing to grant the temporary relief sought risks a “Humpty Dumpty”-like scenario in which USAID, once dismantled, could not be put back together again.

The judge said Thursday that harm amounts to “generalized grievances,” not reaching the high bar needed to win the temporary relief sought.

Justice Department lawyer Michael Clendenen contended that the contractors’ situation is “almost identical” to that of the unions that failed to win injunctive relief while litigation continues.

Nichols questioned a key difference between the two cases — that the USAID employees who were represented by unions were being placed on paid leave, while the contractors stood to be terminated altogether.

But Clendenen suggested the 15-day notice prior to any terminations should provide a buffer to any immediate harm, and any economic harm could be rectified through different channels to seek monetary damages.

The Trump administration has broadly looked to dismantle USAID, including by firing employees and freezing its payments to contractors.

In a separate challenge to the apparent dismantling, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali ordered the Trump administration to immediately release nearly $2 billion in foreign aid payments owed under existing contracts.

The Supreme Court in a 5-4 emergency ruling Wednesday refused to halt that order, handing a loss to the administration.

Later Thursday, Ali will hear arguments over whether further injunctive relief is warranted in that case.

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