LOS ANGELES, United States: A US judge on Thursday ordered six federal agencies to rehire thousands of probationary workers fired as part of Donald Trump´s push to slash the size of the government.
Judge William Alsup said the justification of “poor performance” for mass lay-offs was “a sham in order to try to avoid statutory requirements,” the New York Times reported. Ruling on a lawsuit brought by employee unions, Alsup ordered the departments of the Treasury, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Defense, Energy and Interior to reinstate anyone improperly fired.
“It is a sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that´s a lie,” said Alsup at a hearing at the US District Court in San Francisco.
Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has taken an ax to the US government, cutting spending programs and firing tens of thousands of federal employees. His actions have faced pushback from the courts, with several judges issuing injunctions intended to halt them.A Veterans Affairs spokesperson declined to comment. A Department of Interior spokeswoman said the agency does not comment on litigation over personnel matters.The White House and the other agencies did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The plaintiffs include the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 800,000 federal workers. The union’s president, Everett Kelley, in a statement said the decision was an important victory against “an administration hellbent on crippling federal agencies and their work on behalf of the American public.”
Alsup last month had temporarily blocked OPM from ordering agencies to fire probationary employees, but declined at the time to require that fired workers get their jobs back. The plaintiffs subsequently amended their lawsuit to include the agencies that fired probationary workers.
About 25,000 workers across the US government had been fired as of March 5, according to a tally, and another 75,000 have taken a buyout. The Trump administration has not released statistics on the firings, and it was not immediately clear how many employees could be affected by Thursday’s decision.
In the lawsuit before Alsup, the plaintiffs claim the mass firings were unlawful because they were ordered by OPM rather than left to the discretion of individual agencies. OPM has maintained that it merely asked agencies in a January 20 memo to identify probationary workers and decide which ones were not “mission critical” and could be fired, and did not order them to terminate anyone. The agency on March 4 revised that memo, adding that it was not directing agencies to take any specific actions with respect to probationary employees.
