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A federal judge has determined that Donald Trump’s administration acted outside the law when it ordered the mass dismissal of federal workers, but said those employees will not be returning to their posts.
US District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco reaffirmed his earlier conclusion that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) improperly directed agencies in February to terminate probationary staff on a large scale.
The administration’s decision affected about 25,000 employees. While probationary staff usually have less than a year of service, some of those impacted were long-standing government workers who had recently switched roles.
Limits on reinstatement
Ordinarily, Alsup wrote, he would have reversed the directive and reinstated the employees. But citing recent Supreme Court rulings, he said courts no longer have the power to grant such relief in disputes involving federal hiring and firing.
“The Supreme Court has made clear enough by way of its emergency docket that it will overrule judicially granted relief respecting hirings and firings within the executive, not just in this case but in others,” he said.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court blocked Alsup’s preliminary injunction that had required six agencies to bring back 17,000 staff while the case proceeded. Since that decision, Alsup noted, many former employees have moved on to new positions and the administration has reshaped parts of government. He concluded it was too late to order reinstatement.
Redress without return
Alsup, appointed by Democrat president Bill Clinton, emphasized that the workers “nevertheless continue to be harmed by OPM’s pretextual termination ‘for performance.’” He said the government could provide redress without returning them to work.
He ordered 19 agencies, including the Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Energy, Interior and Treasury, to amend personnel files by November 14. The judge also barred those agencies from carrying out further dismissals under OPM’s directive.
Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, welcomed the ruling. He said it “makes clear that thousands of probationary workers were wrongfully fired, exposes the sham record the government relied upon, and requires the government to tell the wrongly terminated employees that OPM’s reasoning for firing them was false.”
The case, brought by unions, nonprofits and Washington State, is one of the more high-profile cases questioning the limits of presidential authority in managing the federal workforce and the judiciary’s role in reviewing those decisions.
