A judge has temporarily blocked President Donald Trump from placing 2,200 workers at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) on paid leave, hours before it was due to happen.

Judge Carl Nichols issued a “limited” temporary restraining order, in response to a last-minute lawsuit filed by two unions trying to save the agency.The order will remain in place for a week, until 14 February at midnight.

Trump has argued that USAID, the overseas aid agency, is not a valuable use of taxpayer money and wants to dismantle it – he plans to put nearly all of the agency’s 10,000 employees on leave, except 611 workers.Some 500 staff had already been put on administrative leave and another 2,200 were due to join them from midnight on Friday (05:00 GMT).

But the last-minute lawsuit on Friday argued the government was violating the US Constitution, and also that the workers were suffering harm.The judge will also consider a request for a longer-term pause at a hearing on Wednesday.

It is unclear from the court order what will happen to the remaining staff’s jobs.As the ruling came, officials had been removing and covering USAID signs at the organisation’s headquarters in Washington DC.