Federal Judge Rules Trump Has No Authority To Enforce Mass Firings
A federal judge on Thursday handed down an order immediately halting President Donald Trump's administration from laying off thousands of workers across multiple federal agencies.
The Washington Post reported that senior U.S. District Judge William Alsup, who was appointed to the bench by President Bill Clinton, ordered the Trump administration's Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to rescind its orders to agencies to fire probationary-level employees. This includes the U.S. Department of Defense, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service and the National Science Foundation, among others.
“Congress has given the authority to hire and fire to the agencies themselves. The Department of Defense, for example, has statutory authority to hire and fire,” Alsup said. “The Office of Personnel Management does not have any authority whatsoever under any statute in the history of the universe to hire and fire employees at another agency. They can hire and fire their own employees.”
This means that the probationary employees (who have been in their roles for less than a year and have fewer protections than career civil servants) who have been fired could be reinstated soon. Of the roughly 200,000 probationary workers in the federal workforce, tens of thousands had already been fired as a result of OPM's directives, which were sent after South African centibillionaire Elon Musk's employees effectively took over the agency in January.
According to the Post, employees were terminated via a template email sent from OPM, which wrongly suggested that they were being fired for performance-related reasons. National Weather Service meteorologist Cole Hood, who was fired Thursday, posted the OPM termination email to Bluesky which read: "[T]he Agency finds that you re not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and/or skills do not fit the Agency's current needs."
Several labor unions representing fired federal employees challenged the mass firings in court, arguing that OPM "in one fell swoop has perpetrated one of the most massive employment frauds in the history of this country, telling tens of thousands of workers that they are being fired for performance reasons, when they most certainly were not."
Acting OPM head Charles Ezell countered that the unions lacked standing to sue and that they should instead take their concerns to the Federal Labor Relations Authority, which is controlled by a small handful of presidential appointees. He also asserted that Trump has the “inherent constitutional authority” to decide “how best to manage the Executive Branch, including whom to hire and remove, what conditions to place on continued employment, and what processes to employ in making these determinations.” But Judge Alsup disagreed.
“How could so much of the workforce be amputated, suddenly, overnight? It’s so irregular and so widespread and so aberrant in the history of our country. How could this all happen with each agency deciding on its own to do something so aberrational?” Alsup said. “I don’t believe it.”
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
