Federal judges in California and Maryland on Thursday ordered the U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration to reinstate thousands of probationary federal workers who lost their jobs as part of mass firings carried out at 19 agencies.
According to Reuters, the back-to-back rulings were the most significant blow yet to the effort by Trump and top adviser Elon Musk to drastically shrink the federal bureaucracy. Government agencies face a Thursday deadline to submit plans for a second wave of mass layoffs and to slash their budgets.
U.S. District Judge James Bredar in Baltimore agreed with 20 Democratic-led states that 18 of the agencies which had fired probationary employees en masse in recent weeks violated regulations governing the laying off of federal workers.
Bredar’s restraining order applies to, among other agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, all three of which have been in the deregulatory and cost-cutting cross-hairs of the Trump administration.
Other agencies covered by the judge’s order include the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Labor, Transportation, Treasury and Veterans Affairs.
While the administration argued it dismissed each of the employees for performance or other individualised reasons, the judge said that was not true, which would make the job cuts a form of mass layoff necessitating advance notice to the states, who have obligations to assist their newly unemployed citizens.
“The sheer number of employees that were terminated in a matter of days belies any argument that these terminations were due to the employees’ individual unsatisfactory performance or conduct,” wrote Bredar, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama.
His decision came hours after U.S. District Judge William Alsup during a hearing in San Francisco ordered the reinstatement of probationary employees terminated at six agencies, including the U.S. Department of Defence, which was not covered by the Maryland decision.
Alsup said the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the human resources department for federal agencies, had improperly ordered those agencies to fire workers en masse even though it lacked the power to do so.
“It is a sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that’s a lie,” said Alsup, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt in a statement issued following Alsup’s decision said the administration would “immediately fight back.”
“The President has the authority to exercise the power of the entire executive branch – singular district court judges cannot abuse the power of the entire judiciary to thwart the President’s agenda,” Leavitt said.
