Judge, convinced of overseas employees’ safety, denies injunction against USAID

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., on Friday ended a weekslong-halt on the Trump administration’s plan to put the vast majority of employees at the U.S. Agency for International Development on administrative leave, denying unions’ request to issue a preliminary injunction in the case.

The American Foreign Service Association and the American Federation of Government Employees sued to block the apparent effort to decimate the agency and reposition it under the auspices of the State Department. More than 2,000 employees were briefly placed on paid administrative leave before the court’s initial intervention earlier this month, and another 2,000 workers mostly stationed overseas also are on the at-least-temporary chopping block.

U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, had devoted most of his attention during hearings to concerns regarding the continued safety of those overseas workers stationed in high-risk regions. But recent filings from Peter Marocco, the agency’s day-to-day chief under Acting Administrator and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, stating that overseas employees will continue to have access to security-related systems like the SAFE Alert system and the SCRY Panic smartphone app, assuaged the judge’s fears.

“Deputy Administrator Marocco further attests that all overseas employees placed on administrative leave will ‘continue to fall under the authority of the chief of mission’ of their diplomatic posting—i.e., the individual at that posting who is statutorily ‘responsible for the security of the executive branch employees [stationed there] and their eligible family members,” Nichols wrote. “As a result, those employees will continue to be protected through standard ‘residential, personal and physical security programs’ in place at their mission posts . . . Based on this record, the court concludes that the prospect of plaintiffs’ members suffering physical harm from being placed on administrative leave while abroad is highly unlikely.”

The unions’ remaining cited harms, Nichols found, were mostly financial in nature, and thus not “irreparable” for the purposes of a preliminary injunction. And he said the unions’ claims related to the planned shuttering of the agency, despite President Trump’s public comments on the subject, are not ripe.

“It may be the case that, at a high level of generality and in the long run, plaintiffs’ assertions of harm could flow from their constitutional and [Administrative Procedure Act] claims regarding the alleged unlawful ‘dismantling’ of USAID,” Nichols wrote. “But at present, the agency is still standing, and so the alleged injuries on which plaintiffs rely in seeking injunctive relief flow essentially from their members’ existing employment relationships with USAID.”

And since the remaining alleged harms are related to the unions’ representation of employees and potentially adverse employment actions against the workers themselves, Nichols said they must first be channeled through the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Federal Labor Relations Authority or the appropriate analogs for Foreign Service officers.

Nichols’ decision dissolves the existing temporary restraining order that blocked the administration’s actions, which was set to expire at midnight, clearing the way for the agency to place roughly 4,000 employees on leave as soon as Friday night.