A federal judge in San Francisco ruled Thursday that the Trump administration’s recent wave of probationary government employee firings was likely illegal.
Judge William Alsup determined that the Office of Personnel Management that has overseen and guided many of the U.S. federal government’s recent workforce cuts “does not have any authority whatsoever, under any statute in the history of the universe, to hire and fire employees at another agency.” Thousands of probationary employees — workers usually within their first or second year in their positions — have lost their jobs over the past several weeks as President Trump and Elon Musk have taken a chainsaw to what they believe to be a badly bloated federal workforce.
“Probationary employees are the lifeblood of our government,” Alsup added in his ruling. The judge stressed the importance of ensuring there are always workers within the government who are still learning, growing and working their way up to higher positions.
His ruling is the result of a case filed against the U.S. government by multiple labor unions and civic groups. Alsup’s order, notably, only covers the agencies whose fired employees connect back to the civic organizations involved in the suit — namely, the Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, Small Business Administration and the National Science Foundation.
“For months, we have been sounding the alarm — Trump and Musk are illegally gutting the federal workforce to break our government and hand public services to billionaires,” Paul Osadebe, Union Steward with AFGE Local 476 and federal worker and organizer with the Federal Unionists Network, said in a statement released following Alsup’s verdict. “This ruling confirms what we’ve always known: their mass firings are completely arbitrary, lawless and an attack on the American people.”
The government’s lawyers contend that the OPM did not directly order the firing of other agencies’ employees but rather directed said agencies to determine themselves which of their probationary employees needed to stay on and which could be let go. “I think plaintiffs are conflating a request by OPM with an order by OPM,” Kelsey Helland, an assistant U.S. attorney, argued on Thursday.
The government’s case was not strong enough to convince Alsup in the face of statements, emails, similar accounts and termination letters that altogether suggested, in the judge’s eyes, that the OPM likely directly ordered the firings in question. The OPM does not have Congressional authority to fire or hire employees at other agencies, though it does generally serve a Human Resources-type function within the federal government.
Alsup’s ruling should provide some relief to the suing civic groups, labor unions and their members, but it will only cover the OPM directives given to the agencies that connect back in some way to the aforementioned parties.
Speaking on his verdict, Alsup expressed hope that his decision will have a larger effect within the government, saying, “I’m going to count on the government to do the right thing and go further than I have ordered and to let some of these agencies know what I have ruled.”
