Trump Is on Shaky Legal Ground With Mass Layoffs at H.H.S., Experts Say

New York Times

05-04-2025

A 'policy lab' that generates ideas to improve mental health. An office that studies the effects of smoking. A team of scientists and public health experts who focus on birth defects.
All three are programs in the Department of Health and Human Services that were created by Congress, which funds them. And all three have been hollowed out by mass layoffs at the agency ordered by President Trump and Elon Musk, the billionaire adviser leading the federal government's cost-cutting efforts.
Since Tuesday, when the layoffs began, lawmakers, medical associations, research universities and state health agencies have scrambled to sort out which jobs were eliminated, and how to respond. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has already admitted that some workers were mistakenly fired alongside nearly 20 percent of the agency's work force, and has promised that they will be reinstated.
The Republican chairman and top Democrat on the Senate health committee asked Mr. Kennedy to testify about the cuts next week, but it is not clear if he has accepted the invitation. One thing is clear: The layoffs and wholesale reorganization of the department are the latest in a series of Trump administration actions ripe for legal challenges.
The administration has been on shaky ground, legal experts said, in dissolving agencies created and funded by Congress.
Max Stier, the president of Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit that promotes best practices in government, said that the administration had overstepped its authority.
'Is it legal for them to essentially demolish agencies by either firing all the vital talent that's necessary to run them, or to say that they're reorganizing?' said Mr. Stier, who is also a lawyer. 'I believe it is illegal. The reality of this is they are not even close to the line. They've tread over it in terms of the constitutional framework.'
Mr. Stier added, 'It's going to be a question for the courts to resolve.'
The scope of the latest layoffs at the health department — 10,000 people, on top of 10,000 others who had been fired or had left voluntarily — has set the department apart from other federal agencies that have seen similar staff reductions since the start of Mr. Trump's second term.
The agency has been left with the same congressionally mandated responsibilities overseeing a $1.8 trillion budget, most of it devoted to mandatory spending programs like Medicare. The department runs more than 100 other programs that, through drug regulation, biomedical research, hospital reimbursement and child welfare initiatives, touch the lives of every American family. In many cases, those initiatives now have no staff members to administer them.
Congress recently adopted a stopgap spending measure with funding 'that referenced some of these agencies by name,' said Samuel R. Bagenstos, a law professor at the University of Michigan and former health department lawyer under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. He added, 'I think there is a very serious legal question about whether just weeks later the administration can eliminate these agencies.'
Mr. Bagenstos said that more information was needed before lawsuits could be filed. 'They have been very cagey about what exactly they're doing to implement these cuts and this reorganization,' he said.
Mr. Kennedy, acting on orders from Mr. Trump to make large-scale cuts, has said that the staff reductions would save taxpayer money, even though federal health workers make up less than 1 percent of agency spending.
Andrew Nixon, a department spokesman, said that the roughly $1.8 billion the department would recoup through the layoffs was 'still a lot of money,' and that the firings were intended to 'prioritize efficiencies.'
'Any effort to trim wasteful spending, streamline operations and ensure efficiency in government is a win for the American people,' he said.
From the start of the second Trump administration, Mr. Musk's team has pushed agencies to claw back government funds for everything from teacher-training grants to H.I.V. prevention overseas.
The lawsuits challenging those actions have focused on restoring frozen and canceled funding, and halting the mass layoffs. But they have largely not addressed broader legal questions about the president's power to refuse spending appropriated by Congress.
This week, coalitions of Democratic state attorneys general brought two lawsuits targeting the disruptions at the federal health department. Each argued broadly that layoffs and funding cuts across the agency had disrupted the flow of federal funds to states. The rounds of layoffs, they argued, had culled the ranks of grant management, program and scientific staff members who help funds get to state health departments and who approve grants for scientific research.
On Thursday, one federal judge agreed, temporarily barring the agency from terminating around $11 billion in pandemic-era funding to states.
The lawsuits, and others brought against the Trump administration, have relied heavily on the Administrative Procedure Act, a law that bars the executive branch from taking sweeping actions — such as blanket terminations of grant programs — without good reason or consideration. Even though the administration's actions might violate the Constitution and infringe the authority of Congress, the lawsuits have focused more narrowly on whether the administration's actions were arbitrary.
David A. Super, a law professor at Georgetown University, said that the strategy allowed federal courts to stop the government in any case in which a decision could be deemed reckless, without needing to address larger constitutional questions, such as whether Mr. Trump or Mr. Kennedy can withdraw funding from programs they oppose.
'There's a very entrenched rule that courts are not supposed to reach for issues unnecessary to resolve a case,' Mr. Super said. 'And once a court determines something is arbitrary and capricious, they have no reason to think any further about what else might be wrong with it.'
Mr. Trump's decimation of the health department has also led to unusual bipartisan blowback this week.
On Friday, a group of lawmakers from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, including several Republicans, sent a letter to Mr. Trump and Mr. Kennedy asking about the fate of the World Trade Center Health Program, which supports survivors of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The program had already lost around 20 percent of its staff in a round of layoffs earlier this year, but the Trump administration reversed course after a pressure campaign from lawmakers.
On Thursday, 13 senators, including Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, and Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, sent a letter criticizing the firing of the entire staff of the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps households pay heating and cooling bills.
Zachary S. Price, a law professor at the University of California, San Francisco, said that Congress could assert its authority over federal spending in a variety of ways, but had chosen not to under Republican control.
'Congress has just been kind of passive in accepting these changes that could really damage its long-term authority,' he said. 'Litigation can address certain things but is not a great solution when it comes to these programmatic problems.'
Under other circumstances, Congress could withhold funds from agencies other than the health department that Mr. Trump values deeply, or use its oversight authority to subpoena top officials over whether funds are being spent, with the threat of criminal charges for contempt of Congress if the officials do not comply.
Mr. Price said that the budget process has long provided a key check on the White House's power, by forcing the legislative and executive branches to negotiate over the programs Congress funds. The sudden and dramatic cuts spearheaded by Mr. Musk have given Congress outsize importance, he added.
'It gives Congress an opportunity to override presidential policies or choices by either requiring spending or cutting off spending, but that all operates against these background assumptions about the executive branch being bound by the choices reflected in those appropriations,' Mr. Price said. 'So if the executive branch is going to assert unilateral authority to depart from that, then it kind of changes the ballgame.'
Mr. Super, the Georgetown law professor, said that until courts reach firmer conclusions about how the Trump administration may have overstepped its authority, or until they issue final rulings halting some cuts, there was little Congress could do.
'If the administration can disregard two laws, they can disregard three,' he said.