A federal district court on Friday denied the plaintiffs' motion for a preliminary injunction that would halt the Trump Administration's efforts to dismantle the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID. (The full docket for the case, American Federation of Government Employees v. Trump, is here.)
The ruling allows the Administration to keep USAID employees on paid administrative leave and to maintain its pause on funding to the agency. The court's ruling suggests that the plaintiffs aren't going to succeed on the merits, at least not yet, in court. That's because the court held that alternative statutory schemes allow and require USAID employees to bring administrative complaints before they appeal to court.
The ruling also suggests that USAID employees and unions may not be the best plaintiffs to challenge and halt the Administration's dismantling of the agency. Recipients or beneficiaries of USAID contracts or programming may be in a better position to raise and prevail on the separation-of-powers arguments that were at the core of the plaintiffs' complaint in this case.
The plaintiffs' amended complaint raised several challenges to the Administration's efforts to dismantle the agency, all reducing to the argument that the President lacks unilateral and plenary power, without congressional say-so, to dissolve USAID. But the court focused on the effects that the Administration's actions had on USAID employees. It held that the plaintiffs' complaint amounted to employment grievances that are covered by comprehensive statutory schemes and that require employees to raise their grievances before administrative agencies before bringing them to court. In short,
it appears likely that the claims made by plaintiffs in seeking preliminary injunctive relief "fall within the exclusive statutory scheme[s] of [the Federal Service Labor-Management Relations Statute, the Civil Service Reform Act, and the Foreign Service Act], which plaintiffs "may not bypass by filing suit in the district court." That is almost certainly true of plaintiffs' claims regarding the placement of their members on administrative leave and their members' possibly expedited recall from post, because, for all the reasons just discussed, those claims concern changes in employment conditions and are thus "of the type" that Congress intended to be redressed through the applicable remedial frameworks. And it may well also be true of plaintiffs' claims regarding the funding freeze itself, because plaintiffs' present allegations of injury from that action again turn on its effects on their members in their capacities as employees–like its supposed infliction of additional financial liability for the cost of contracts or unpaid living expenses. As much as plaintiffs assert that they "challenge a sweeping scheme to dismantle an entire agency," their only ripe theories of harm fundamentally rely on their members' employment relationship with USAID.