WaPo (“Judge orders Trump officials to offer jobs back to fired probationary workers“):
A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Trump administration to offer jobs back to all probationary employees who were fired last month from the departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior, Treasury and Veterans Affairs under directions by the Office of Personnel Management, a ruling that could reinstate thousands of employees who were ousted as part of the president’s push to slash the federal workforce.
Judge William Alsup said at a hearing in U.S. District Court in San Francisco that OPM — which serves as the federal government’s human resources agency — had no legal authority to direct the mass firings in phone calls and written communications last month. He added that individual agencies could follow the steps laid out in a federal law called the Reduction in Force Act to pare back their staffs.
The ruling marked the most significant challenge so far to President Donald Trump’s effort to shrink and reshape the sprawling, 2.3-million person federal workforce. Alsup also extended a temporary restraining order he had granted last month to a group of labor unions and advocacy groups who sued over the terminations.
Alsup castigated a Justice Department attorney arguing on behalf of the Trump administration for submitting “sham” documents and “stonewalling” efforts to gather facts and testimony, incensed that the acting director of OPM, Charles Ezell, refused to testify in court Thursday as the judge had previously ordered.
“I tend to doubt that you’re telling me the truth,” Alsup told Assistant U.S. Attorney Kelsey Helland, the lone Justice Department lawyer at the hearing.
“You will not bring the people here to be cross-examined,” the judge said. “You’re afraid to do so, because … it would reveal the truth. This is the U.S. District Court. … I’ve been practicing or serving in this court for over 50 years, and I know how we get to the truth.”
The judge previously issued a temporary restraining order last month, finding that OPM’s directives to terminate all probationary workers at the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, as well as the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, Small Business Administration and Fish and Wildlife Service, were “unlawful, invalid, and must be stopped and rescinded.”
Justice Department attorneys representing the Trump administration maintained that OPM never ordered federal agencies to fire employees and was only offering guidance, despite the fact that multiple human resources officials — from the IRS and National Science Foundation and the departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy and Veterans Affairs — have said OPM ordered them to dismiss their probationary workers, according to court records.
While a temporary victory for the rule of the law, it’s likely a Pyrrhic one. If the agencies can simply turn around and implement a Reduction in Force, these people will be among the first to go unless they’re disabled veterans or otherwise entitled to special protections.
