| Shortly after returning to the White House, President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to lay off thousands of federal workers. This week — as national attention is on unfilled positions at the National Weather Service in Texas — the Supreme Court said he can make plans to do that. That’s despite Congress having the sole power to fund the government. “He’s winning a lot, and this is a big win,” said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School and host of the “Passing Judgment” podcast. Legal experts say this emergency ruling on federal workers is part of a broader pattern of the Supreme Court favoring expansive presidential power in Trump’s second term. Here’s what’s going on. Trump has gained a lot of control over federal spending Citing diversity initiatives or a “radical leftwing agenda,” Trump has frozen millions in federal grants on everything from climate research to teaching grants. He’s dismantled entire government agencies, already fired thousands of federal workers and his administration is considering how to stop spending congressionally appropriated funds. The Supreme Court has allowed much of this to continue while the longer legal battles play out. The latest: The court said this week that Trump could make plans to fire workers. The court stressed it didn’t rule whether mass firings are legal without Congress’s input. Even two of the court’s three liberal justices said the president has enough authority over the federal government to at least make these plans. But government scientists, health care workers and diplomats are bracing to be laid off as early as this week. “So many of us think this is going to allow the administration to just lay off swaths of highly capable scientists,” a U.S. Geological Survey researcher told The Washington Post’s Hannah Natanson and Meryl Kornfield. Trump’s layoff plan is a derivative of what billionaire Elon Musk started with the U.S. DOGE Service. Trump ordered federal agencies to make plans to lay off workers en masse in February. Around the same time, Musk rapidly fired tens of thousands of federal employees. It’s not immediately clear how many firings will happen now. The government lost so many experts overseeing critical public functions like disease control and nuclear weapon inspection that it’s started trying to hire some of them back. The Social Security Administration has struggled with long wait times and crashed websites after losing thousands of workers and this week is moving much of its staff to answer phone calls. Lower courts could still stop actual firings of federal workers if they think it overrides Congress’s role in funding the federal government. But Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said she feared that would come too late: “For some reason, this Court sees fit to step in now and release the President’s wrecking ball at the outset of this litigation,” she wrote in her dissent. Experts see a Supreme Court inclined to support presidential power The court hasn’t made final rulings on the merits of any of Trump’s actions, but the justices have so far been open to letting the president take control of hiring, firing and some spending — while limiting lower courts’ ability to step in to stop him. Last week, the Supreme Court made it much harder for lower courts to block Trump’s nationwide policies even if they might be unconstitutional, like stopping birthright citizenship. (On Thursday, a federal judge temporarily stopped Trump from banning birthright citizenship by using a separate legal method known as a class-action lawsuit.) It comes as Trump and his allies have attacked lower court judges who rule against him. “No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent of that case. Alex Tausanovitch, a spending expert with the group Protect Democracy, said earlier this year that Trump is trying to take taxpayer spending decisions away from Congress, as the Constitution designed, and put it in his hands. “This could be one of the most massive and unconstitutional power grabs in U.S. history,” he said. Trump and his allies argue that Congress and the courts have less power over the president than they think. “It’s like you have the CEO of the executive branch,” said Mike Davis, head of the conservative Article III Project, which advocates for a more muscular executive through conservative-leaning courts. “You can hire, fire, you can move troops; the president has the constitutional power to repel sudden attack or invasion.” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. recently said the job of the courts is to be independent and “check the excesses of Congress or the executive.” But the court’s critics see a judicial system unwilling to stand up to a president who is trying to limit the other branches’ powers. “We should all be worried, because this is an executive branch that frankly wants more power and that looks for these confrontations,” former U.S. attorney Joyce Vance, now a professor at the University of Alabama School of Law, said in a Brennan Center for Justice briefing with reporters this week. “It’s up to the courts to keep them in line.” “We are in a moment where not just the executive branch but the Supreme Court is a threat to the rule of law,” Kimberly Wehle, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law and author of the newsletter “Simple Politics,” said in the same briefing. “I think the Supreme Court is becoming just as dangerous as the Trump administration.” | 
