Fresh off a win in court last week against the Trump administration, Santa Clara County and San Francisco are joining a national coalition in a new lawsuit against the federal government — this time taking aim at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
The lawsuit, which was filed on Monday in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, challenges President Donald Trump’s “critical transformation of the federal bureaucracy,” which he laid out in a Feb. 11 executive order. The order gave new guidance for DOGE, tasking federal agencies to work with the Musk-led initiative to reduce the size of the federal workforce and limit hiring.
But the coalition, which includes unions, nonprofits and several other local governments, says what Trump is doing is unconstitutional.
“The president does not possess authority to reorganize, downsize or otherwise transform the agencies of the federal government, unless and until Congress authorizes such action,” the lawsuit reads.
Nine presidents — ranging from Herbert Hoover to Ronald Reagan — have been granted reorganization authority by Congress to create or reshape federal agencies. It was used by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 to consolidate all national parks and monuments into the National Park System and by Richard Nixon in 1970 to establish the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration within the Department of Commerce.
Trump has enlisted DOGE, along with the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management, “to serve his goals of radical transformation,” and mandate other agencies to create plans to reorganize and reduce their workforce, the lawsuit said.
Those plans are already taking shape. The Department of Health and Human Services announced last month that a “dramatic restructuring” would save taxpayers $1.8 billion per year by laying off 10,000 employees — many of whom were employed by the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. The Small Business Administration is also expected to reduce its workforce by 43% and the Department of Labor has already put some employees on administrative leave, according to Bloomberg Law.
DOGE claims that it has saved taxpayers $160 billion, but a new analysis from the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service estimates that putting employees on paid leave and rehiring federal workers who were mistakenly fired will cost $135 billion.
While some of the coalition includes labor unions representing federal workers and nonprofits with national interests, the six local governments — Santa Clara County, San Francisco, King County, Washington; Harris County, Texas; Chicago and Baltimore — argue that Trump’s actions will cause them “ongoing harm” due to “delays and reductions in services provided by the federal agencies on which they rely.”
One of those agencies is NOAA. Earlier this year, hundreds of employees, including weather forecasters, that were on probationary status were fired. NOAA is also expected to fall prey to massive budget cuts later this year. In the lawsuit, the coalition argues that many of the local governments rely on NOAA for forecasting, modeling and other real-time weather data that in some cases help them prepare for an emergency.
Over the last few months, Santa Clara County and San Francisco have been locked in a legal battle with the Trump administration. Last week, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against Trump, effectively blocking him from withholding federal funds from jurisdictions that have declared themselves as “sanctuaries” for immigrants living in the country illegally. Santa Clara County and San Francisco have also filed separate lawsuits around Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship.
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