San Francisco, Santa Clara Counties Sue Trump Over Mass DOGE-Led Firings

Updated 1:05 p.m. Tuesday

Two Bay Area counties are suing the Trump administration over its reorganization and downsizing of the federal government without congressional approval, their top attorneys announced Tuesday.

San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu and Santa Clara County Counsel Tony LoPresti joined cities and counties in Texas, Illinois, Washington and Maryland, as well as labor unions representing affected workers, to bring the suit alleging that the mass restructuring violates the constitutional principle of separation of powers.

The suit, which names President Donald Trump, the Department of Government Efficiency, the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of Management and Budget, was filed Monday evening in the U.S. District Court of Northern California.

“This case really boils down to the basic civics that we all learned in high school. There are three co-equal branches of government,” LoPresti said at a Tuesday press conference in San José. “The president’s job is to execute the laws, not to make the laws. When the president attempts to take the legislative power away from the legislative branch and claim it as his own, we are facing an existential threat to democracy.”

The plaintiffs allege that Trump’s executive orders, which demand reductions in the function and workforce of federal departments, exceed his executive authority and illegally take away Congress’ exclusive authority to create U.S. law.

Chiu and LoPresti argue that Trump needs the legislative branch’s permission to make these significant changes to the size and structure of the federal government — a rule he should know, the lawsuit said, since he “tried and failed to obtain that authorization during his first term in office.”

“President Trump determined that in his second term, he would proceed without Congress,” the lawsuit alleges.

In his first weeks in office, Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency, which, despite its name, is set up as a White House executive office, not an official Cabinet-level department. Headed by Elon Musk, DOGE was tasked with carrying out an 18-month agenda to reduce the government’s “waste, bloat, and insularity.”

In February, Trump introduced an executive order on his “Workforce Optimization Initiative,” which required all government agencies to submit downsizing plans to DOGE, along with the offices of Management and Budget, and Personnel Management.

So far, more than 58,000 employees have been fired as part of the DOGE-led restructuring, while 76,000 more took a buyout offered by the Trump administration in January, according to data tracked by the New York Times. (The federal government has kept no official tally of the number of affected workers.) 

Planned cuts could hit more than 148,000 additional federal workers, according to the Times tracker, and multiple government agencies have been all but shut down through hiring and funding freezes and executive orders from the president.

“Our federal government has been decimated and thrown into complete disarray,” Chiu said Tuesday. “These dramatic and illegal changes have made it extremely difficult for local communities and local governments to effectively deliver our programs and services, as massive layoffs and staffing shortages have ground intergovernmental work to a halt.”

This week’s lawsuit alleges that Trump’s executive order on the federal workforce and three others targeting a dozen specific government agencies — including the Department of Education, the Institute of Peace, and the Presidio Trust in San Francisco — violate the requirement for congressional approval.

“The Workforce Executive Order does not simply suggest or encourage agencies to exercise their own statutory authority to effectuate a government-wide reorganization: it orders them to act according to the President’s vision, regardless of that statutory authority,” the lawsuit reads.

The local governments and labor unions are requesting that a federal judge vacate the executive order to downsize the federal workforce and declare that Trump acted unconstitutionally. It also asks the judge to find that departments carrying out Trump’s requests have acted unlawfully and outside the authority granted to them by Congress.

“When the president takes for himself the legislative power of Congress to recreate federal agencies in the manner he sees fit, he violates the Constitution,” the suit said. “And when the president does so across every federal agency, he threatens the very constitutional foundation of this nation.”

If successful, the parties aim to halt future reduction-in-force plans at federal agencies and reverse cuts they say were made unconstitutionally, which have already affected Bay Area National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration workers, air traffic controllers, and Health and Human Services employees.

“As far as I know, we still live in a democracy, and what is happening is illegal and authoritarian,” Chiu said. “This is why San Francisco stands with this coalition and this lawsuit to stand up for the constitution and our rule of law while it still exists.”