When the White House issued a memo in late September directing federal agencies to plan for mass layoffs instead of furloughs during a government shutdown, a group of lawyers representing federal worker unions was ready.
“Once we saw the memo, all of us sort of huddled to figure out what we should do because it was clearly on its face, there were issues,” recalled Rushab Sanghvi, general counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees.
AFGE had been working with a number of other law firms and legal groups in challenges against the Trump administration. So by the time the memo hit, they knew how’d they would move forward to get a lawsuit together.