The Trump administration can for now continue its mass firings of federal employees, a federal judge ruled on Thursday, rejecting a bid by a group of labor unions to halt President Donald Trump’s dramatic downsizing of the roughly 2.

A federal judge declined to immediately order the State Department to stop withholding funds for refugee resettlement programs. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops had sued to have the funds released after the Trump administration’s freeze forced it to pay out more than $24 million to maintain services to around 5,000 refugees in the U.S.

A federal judge declined to direct the Trump administration to reinstate funding for refugee resettlement programs after Catholic bishops challenged the freeze, but signaled he might do so in the

A federal judge said the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops had failed to show it would be irreparably harmed by a delay in receiving refugee funding.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops said the State Department had failed to pay $13 million in unpaid reimbursements from November 2024, with additional costs rising since the resettlement program was suspended on Jan.