Updated: March 13, 2:54 p.m. ET.
The Trump administration must reinstate to their jobs federal employees it has fired in the last month at six large departments after a judge on Thursday called the terminations unlawful.
The reinstatements are to take immediate effect, Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for Northern California said when issuing his preliminary injunction from the bench, and agencies were directed not to make any excuse for delaying the rehirings. Roughly 24,000 federal employees in their probationary periods—typically those hired within the last one or two years, whom agencies can quickly fire for cause—will regain their jobs as a result of the decision, according to figures compiled by Government Executive.
The order impacts all fired probationary staff from the departments of Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior and Treasury. Alsup said he may extend the injunction to other agencies in the future, as the American Federation of Government Employees and the other groups that brought the lawsuit are seeking.
The judge made clear the Trump administration, like any other, can engage in mass reductions of the federal workforce, but it must do so by following federal statutes and the Constitution. The Office of Personnel Management directed agencies to carry out the firings, Alsup concluded, which he said circumvented those established procedures.
“This is not ‘some wild and crazy judge in San Francisco said some administration cannot engage in a reduction in force,’” Alsup said.
He added that OPM provided a template for federal agencies to use as termination letters for the impacted staff, which suggested employees were being fired for poor performance. He cited an example of an earth science employee at the Agriculture Department being fired after receiving only outstanding performance reviews in explaining that OPM, and the Justice Department lawyers arguing the case, were being dishonest in making that assertion.
“The reason that OPM had wanted to put this based on performance was at least in my view a gimmick to avoid the [RIF laws],” the judge said.
He added: “It’s a sad, sad day when our government would fire a good employee and say it’s based on performance when they know good and well that is based on a lie.”
The judge’s order specifically called for the covered agencies to reinstate all probationary employees fired Feb. 13 or Feb. 14 or any day thereabout and immediately notify them that their terminations were found to be unlawful in court. Agencies should cease using the template OPM provided and the human resources agency is now prohibited from issuing any guidance related to probationary firings.
Thursday’s hearing got off to a testy start, as Alsup derided the Trump administration for defying his order to produce acting OPM Director Chuck Ezell for testimony. The DOJ attorneys called Ezell’s testimony “not necessary” and withdrew the written declaration he had submitted to assert he had never ordered the firings of probationary employees.
“Why can’t you bring your people in to be cross-examined or deposed at their convenience?” Alsup asked, adding that the refusal to do so was “a sham. It upsets me.”
The Trump administration submitted press releases from agencies alluding to the firings, which a Justice attorney said demonstrated they made the firing decisions on their own. Alsup said he rejected that argument and cited several examples of agencies stating to employees or elsewhere that they were taking the actions “per OPM instruction.”
Alsup ordered Noah Peters, a senior advisor at OPM, to submit to three hours of deposition from the plaintiffs. Prior to his injunction on Thursday, Alsup had issued a temporary restraining order forcing OPM to rescind its directive and guidance related to the probationary firings. He extended that order as part of his new ruling.
In a separate case challenging the probationary firings in a federal court in Maryland, agency HR and other officials disputed the Trump administration’s arguments. Jeffrey Grant, who until the end of February served as the deputy director for operations in the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, submitted written testimony in the case that the justifications his agency used for probationary firings “were false.” Grant said he personally helped vet many of the recent hires and they were both well qualified and had performed well since their onboardings.
“They were truly the best of the best,” Grant said. “They had exceptional knowledge, skills, and ability as measured against the work we asked them to perform.”
He added the employees’ performances were never evaluated by those deciding to fire them, nor were their positions reviewed in relation to Trump administration priorities.
Traci DiMartini, who served at the chief human capital officer at the Internal Revenue Service until she was placed on administrative leave earlier this month, also submitted testimony on the case in which she said her boss at the Treasury Department relayed that the firings of 6,700 IRS employees must take place because OPM ordered them.
“In all my decades of human resource management for the federal government, I had never before received a directive such as this one,” DiMartini said. “Typically, the decision to terminate a probationary employee lies solely with the probationary employee’s manager.”
She added that OPM’s directive “was plainly an effort to reduce headcount and did not involve any evaluation of the job performance of probationary employees.”
This story has been updated with additional details.
