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A federal judge in California has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from ordering the US defense department and other agencies to carry out the mass firings of some employees.
The US district judge William Alsup said in San Francisco on Thursday that the US office of personnel management (OPM) lacked the power to order federal agencies to fire any workers, including probationary employees who typically have less than a year of experience.
Alsup ordered the OPM, the human resources department for federal agencies, to rescind a 20 January and a 14 February email directing agencies to identify probationary employees who should be fired.
Alsup said he could not order the defense department itself, which is expected to fire 5,400 probationary employees on Friday, and other agencies not to terminate workers because they are not defendants in the lawsuit brought by several unions and nonprofit groups.
But he suggested that the mass firings of federal workers that began two weeks ago would cause widespread harm, including cuts to national parks, scientific research, and services for veterans.
“Probationary employees are the lifeblood of our government. They come in at a low level and work their way up. That’s how we renew ourselves,” said Alsup, a Bill Clinton appointee.
Alsup handed down the order in a case brought by labor unions and nonprofits filed last week.
The complaint filed by five labor unions and five nonprofit organizations is among multiple lawsuits pushing back on the administration’s efforts to vastly shrink the federal workforce.
Thousands of probationary employees have already been fired. Just on Thursday, hundreds of workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), the US’s pre-eminent climate research agency, learned they had lost their jobs.
The plaintiffs say the OPM had no authority to terminate the jobs of probationary workers who generally have less than a year on the job. They also say the firings were predicated on a lie of poor performance by the workers.
The Trump administration has maintained that the memo and email from the OPM merely asked agencies to review their probationary workforces and decide who could potentially be terminated, and did not require them to do anything.
“An order is not usually phrased as a request,” Kelsey Helland of the US Department of Justice told Alsup during the hearing.
But the judge said it was unlikely that virtually every federal agency independently decided to decimate its staff.
“How could that all happen with each agency deciding on its own to do something so aberrational? I don’t believe it,” Alsup said.
There are an estimated 200,000 probationary workers – generally employees who have less than a year on the job – across federal agencies. About 15,000 are employed in California, providing services ranging from fire prevention to veterans’ care, the complaint says.
