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Donald Trump at Manhattan Criminal Court, Thursday, May 30, 2024, in New York (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, Pool).
A federal judge in Maryland on Thursday evening ordered the Trump administration to rehire tens of thousands of recently terminated federal workers and issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting additional unlawful mass firings, becoming the second judge to issue such an order in the same day.
The sweeping 56-page ruling from Maryland-based U.S. District Judge James Bredar covers firings across 18 different agencies, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Department of Education, and Homeland Security. Bredar reasoned that the administration’s actions appeared to be an attempt to skirt statutory constraints regarding “reductions in force” (RIFs) by falsely claiming that each of the thousands of workers were fired for “performance or other individualized reason.”
“In this case, the government conducted massive layoffs, but it gave no advance notice,” the judge wrote. “It claims it wasn’t required to because, it says, it dismissed each one of these thousands of probationary employees for ‘performance’ or other individualized reasons. On the record before the Court, this isn’t true. There were no individualized assessments of employees. They were all just fired. Collectively. Accordingly, in the language of relevant laws, these big government layoffs were actually ‘Reductions in Force,’ or ‘RIFs.’ And, because these were ‘RIFs,’ they had to be preceded by notice to the states that would be impacted.”
The ruling came as the result of a lawsuit filed by 19 Democratic state attorneys general and Washington, D.C., which alleged that the Trump administration failed to follow procedures mandated by the Administrative Procedures Act for “reductions in force,” which require giving employees at least 60 days notice of mass terminations. Without such notice, the plaintiff States were not prepared for the impact resulting from the deluge of about 24,000 people being suddenly added their unemployed populations, Bredar said.
The ruling is yet another impediment to the Trump administration’s effort to gut the federal workforce at breakneck speed.
The Department of Justice had previously argued that the states did not have standing to sue over the allegedly unlawful terminations, asserting that they were unaffected third parties whose claims were based on theoretical “downstream harm.” The DOJ further claimed that the administration had the discretion to fire the employees and that the firings did not constitute a RIF because they only terminated probationary employees, which are typically workers who’ve been hired or promoted to a new position within the last year.
Probationary workers can be terminated pursuant to a lawful RIF, for performance-related reasons, or conditions related to their previous employment. But the government did not go about the firings in any of the permitted ways, Bredar said.
“Here, the terminated probationary employees were plainly not terminated for cause,” the judge wrote. “The sheer number of employees that were terminated in a matter of days belies any argument that these terminations were due to the employees’ individual unsatisfactory performance or conduct. As Plaintiffs allege, the Government has terminated at least 24,000 probationary employees. It is simply not conceivable that the Government could have conducted individualized assessments of the relevant employees in the relevant timeframe.”
He added, “The Government’s contention to the contrary borders on the frivolous.”
Bredar noted that his stay on the firings and order to reinstate workers would be a large burden for the government. However, he emphasized that such a burden was a problem of the Trump administration’s own making.
“When, as is likely the case here, the Government has engaged in an illegal scheme spanning broad swaths of the federal workforce, it is inevitable that the remediation of that scheme will itself be a significant task,” he wrote.
Earlier in the day, California-based District Judge William Alsup similarly tore into the Trump administration for its “unlawful” firing of tens of thousands of probationary employees over the past month and a half, calling it a “sad day” when the government would terminate “good” workers supposedly on the basis of performance — knowing “good and well that’s a lie.” He subsequently ordered the agencies to “immediately” rehire those who had been booted.
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