A California federal judge on Thursday ordered the Office of Personnel Management to temporarily rescind directives prompting the mass firings of probationary employees at dozens of federal agencies, a major blow to the Trump administration’s efforts to drastically slash the size of the government.
“Congress has given the authority to hire and fire to the agencies themselves. The Department of Defense, for example, has statutory authority to hire and fire,” U.S. District Judge William Alsup reportedly said from the bench Thursday afternoon in San Francisco. “The Office of Personnel Management does not have any authority whatsoever under any statute in the history of the universe to hire and fire employees at another agency. They can hire and fire their own employees.”
The decision also required the agency to inform certain agencies it lacked the power to order the mass firings.
The finding was the latest step in a lawsuit filed last week, after thousands of early-career government workers were terminated, part of the administration’s push with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to drastically shrink the government’s spending and headcount.
Since February 13, “tens of thousands of probationary employees across dozens of federal agencies have already been terminated in the summary, assembly-line fashion directed by OPM,” according to the suit, which was filed on behalf of the American Federation of Government Employees and other labor groups.
The unions alleged that the Office of Personnel Management lacked the statutory authority to order terminations, ignored federal employment law in carrying them out, went against agency wishes in some cases, and used a template email from the HR agency to “falsely inform employees that their terminations are for performance reasons rather than as part of a government-wide policy to reduce headcount,” even for high-performing employees.
The Trump administration had argued that the HR agency wasn’t directing the firings, and that each agency reached its own decisions.
“Agencies were responsible for deciding which probationary employees to keep and to terminate,” the agency’s acting director, Charles Ezell, wrote in court documents.
The Office of Personnel Management declined to comment.
The Independent has contacted the White House for comment.
The lawsuit argued that government personnel themselves described the HR agency’s communications as mandates, citing examples like a town hall at the Internal Revenue Service where Chief Human Capital Officer Traci DeMartini told employees the firing of probationary workers “was something that was directed from OPM,” and that “even the letters that your colleagues received yesterday were letters that were written by OPM, put forth through Treasury, and given to us.”
Judge Alsup seemed unpersuaded by the Trump administration’s arguments.
“How could so much of the work force be amputated – it’s so irregular and so widespread and so aberrant in the history of our country?” he said in court. “How could that all happen (with) each agency deciding on its own?”
Ezell will be ordered to testify at a forthcoming March 13 hearing, the court said.
The ruling does not order the federal government to rehire fired workers, with Alsup noting he did not have the immediate authority to order such a step.
It also does not immediately apply to workers represented by the unions in the suit either. The labor groups must bring their complaints to an administrative agency first.
The agency at the center of the lawsuit was also responsible for sending out a mass email to federal workers requiring them to submit five things they accomplished that week or face termination or resignation, an effort that multiple agencies, including the HR office, later told employees to treat as voluntary.
The office also coordinated the administration’s offer to offer approximately two million federal employees the chance to accept a buyout if they resign later this year.
