[SutterBrother]

Originally Posted by troutman

Trump Administration Live Updates: Judge Orders Thousands of Federal Workers Reinstated [NYTimes]

Link (paywall)

A federal judge on Thursday ordered six federal agencies to rehire thousands of workers with probationary status who had been fired as part of President Trump’s government-gutting initiative.

Ruling from the bench, Judge William H. Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California went further than a previous ruling. He found that the Trump administration’s firing of probationary workers had essentially been done unlawfully by fiat from the Office of Personnel Management, the government’s human resources arm. Only agencies themselves have broad hiring and firing powers, he said.

He directed the Treasury and the Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Defense, Energy and Interior Departments to comply with his order and offer to reinstate any probationary employees who were improperly terminated. But he added that he was open to expanding his decision later to apply to other agencies where the extent of harms had not been as fully documented yet.

His order stemmed from a lawsuit brought by federal employee unions that challenged the legality of how those agencies went about firing probationary workers en masse. The unions argued that those workers were swept up in a larger effort by Mr. Trump and his top adviser, Elon Musk, to arbitrarily ravage the federal government and demoralize its employees.