By Dan Levine and Daniel Wiessner
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – A California federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from ordering the U.S. Department of Defense and other agencies to carry out the mass firings of thousands of recently hired employees.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco said during a hearing that the U.S. Office of Personnel Management lacked the power to order federal agencies to fire any workers, including probationary employees who typically have less than a year of experience.
Alsup ordered OPM, the human resources department for federal agencies, to rescind a January 20 memo and a February 14 email directing agencies to identify probationary employees who should be fired.
Alsup said he could not order the Defense Department itself, which is expected to fire 5,400 probationary employees on Friday, and other agencies not to terminate workers because they are not defendants in the lawsuit brought by several unions and nonprofit groups.
But he suggested that the mass firings of federal workers that began two weeks ago would cause widespread harm, including cuts to national parks, scientific research, and services for veterans.
“Probationary employees are the lifeblood of our government. They come in at a low level and work their way up. That’s how we renew ourselves,” said Alsup, an appointee of Democratic former President Bill Clinton.
The Trump administration has maintained that the memo and email from OPM merely asked agencies to review their probationary workforces and decide who could potentially be terminated, and did not require them to do anything.
“An order is not usually phrased as a request,” Kelsey Helland of the U.S. Department of Justice told Alsup during the hearing.
But the judge said it was unlikely that virtually every federal agency independently decided to decimate its staff.
“How could that all happen with each agency deciding on its own to do something so aberrational? I don’t believe it,” Alsup said.
(Reporting by Dan Levine in San Francisco and Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York; Editing by Chris Reese and Stephen Coates)
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