A JUDGE has temporarily blocked President Donald Trump from placing 2,200 workers at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) on paid leave, hours before it was due to happen.
Judge Carl Nichols issued a “limited” temporary restraining order, in response to a last-minute lawsuit filed by two unions trying to save the agency.
The order will remain in place for a week, until 14 February at midnight.
Trump has argued that USAID, the overseas aid agency, is not a valuable use of taxpayer money and wants to dismantle it – he plans to put nearly all of the agency’s 10,000 employees on leave, except 611 workers.
Some 500 staff had already been put on administrative leave and another 2,200 were due to join them from midnight on Friday (05:00 GMT).
But the last-minute lawsuit on Friday argued the government was violating the US Constitution, and also that the workers were suffering harm.
Judge Nichols sided with the unions, saying they would suffer “irreparable harm” if the court did not intervene, while there would be “zero harm to the government”.
“All USAID employees currently on administrative leave shall be reinstated until that date, and shall be given complete access to email, payment, and security notification systems until that date, and no additional employees shall be placed on administrative leave before that date,” Nichols wrote.
The judge will also consider a request for a longer-term pause at a hearing on Wednesday.
It is unclear from the court order what will happen to the remaining staff’s jobs.
As the ruling came, officials had been removing and covering USAID signs at the organisation’s headquarters in Washington DC.
