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BOSTON (CN) — The First Circuit on Thursday left in place a Rhode Island judge’s ruling that temporarily halts President Donald Trump’s administration from taking measures to eliminate federal agencies that fund libraries and museums, mediate labor disputes, and support minority-owned businesses.
A coalition of over 20 Democratic attorneys general sued Trump in April to block the March executive order titled “Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy,” claiming that the president was far overreaching his authority.
The three federal agencies provide grants and other funding to public libraries, museums, workers and minority-owned businesses across the country. Each was created by Congress with statutory duties and hundreds of millions of dollars of congressional funding, the states said.
The executive order required the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Minority Business Development Agency, and the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service to reduce their functions and personnel to “the minimum presence and function required by law” within seven days.
State librarians were notified by email that the museum and library institute would not be able to respond to their inquiries due to the entire staff being placed on administrative leave. The agency also terminated over 1,000 grants with a cookie-cutter letter simply stating that the funding was “no longer consistent with the [agency’s] priorities,” pointing to the executive order.
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter F. Neronha co-leads the suit with New York Attorney General Letitia James and Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez and is joined by attorneys general of Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin.
The effort to shrink the federal government and test the limits of Trump’s executive powers hit a roadblock in May, when Chief U.S. District Judge John McConnell Jr. granted the coalition’s motion for preliminary injunction, deciding that the executive order violates the Administrative Procedures Act and the separation of powers doctrine.
“Once again, this court is confronted with a legal challenge by various states against an executive order that attempts to dismantle congressionally sanctioned agencies and ignores congressionally appropriated funds,” the Barack Obama appointee wrote in the 49-page opinion.
On appeal before the First Circuit, the Trump administration requested a stay pending appeal of McConnell’s ruling on the preliminary injunction halting the executive order from going into effect.
The Trump administration asserted on appeal that the plaintiffs lacked Article III standing to seek general oversight of three agencies’ ongoing process of compliance with an executive order and also lacked a cause of action under the Administrative Procedure Act to challenge what they call “closure decisions,” which are not final agency actions.
“And any harm shown, in any event, pales in comparison to harm the preliminary injunction visits on the government by interfering with significant swaths of executive branch discretion to manage its day-to-day affairs and preventing leadership from implementing the president’s directives to streamline federal agencies,” the Trump administration wrote in an appellant brief.
The Boston-based First Circuit on Thursday found that the Trump administration had not demonstrated that the preliminary injunction would cause irreparable harm and denied a motion to stay the lower court decision pending appeal.
“In any event, the substantial harm that the plaintiffs allege with respect to the termination of employees is not the ‘loss of government employment’ itself,” the First Circuit panel wrote in its 32-page opinion. “It is the lost services that flow from the terminations’ effective dismantling of each of the relevant agencies. And we have found analogous harms in the form of lost services flowing from an agency-wide RIF sufficient to demonstrate that plaintiffs faced substantial injury.”
Chief U.S. Circuit Judge David Barron, a Barack Obama appointee, penned the three-judge panel’s opinion.
U.S. Circuit Judges William J. Kayatta, an Obama appointee, and Julie Rikelman, a Joe Biden appointee, joined him on the panel.
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