Key points
- US Supreme Court decisions limit legal remedy
- Agencies told to correct employee records
- Unions say firings based on false claims
ISLAMABAD: A federal judge ruled that US President Donald Trump’s administration had unlawfully ordered the dismissal of thousands of federal employees. However, the judge declined to mandate their reinstatement, citing recent rulings by the US Supreme Court.
US District Judge William Alsup, sitting in San Francisco, reaffirmed his earlier conclusion that the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) had, in February, illegally instructed numerous federal agencies to terminate probationary staff en masse, reports Reuters.
Unions, non-profit organisations, and the state of Washington filed a lawsuit after the Trump administration sought to dismiss around 25,000 probationary employees — typically individuals with under a year of service, although some had served longer in different roles.
Alsup stated that under normal circumstances, he would “set aside OPM’s unlawful directive and unwind its consequences, returning the parties to the ex ante status quo, and as a consequence, probationers to their posts.”
Legal proceedings
“But the Supreme Court has made clear enough by way of its emergency docket that it will overrule judicially granted relief respecting hirings and firings within the executive, not just in this case but in others,” Alsup wrote.
In April, the Supreme Court halted a preliminary injunction previously issued by Alsup, which had required six federal agencies to reinstate 17,000 employees while legal proceedings continued.
Alsup noted that too many changes had occurred since the Supreme Court’s decision in April to warrant reinstatement, as many of the affected employees had secured other roles and the administration had restructured parts of the government.
Probationary workers
However, Alsup — who was appointed by Democratic President Bill Clinton — affirmed that the employees “nevertheless continue to be harmed by OPM’s pretextual termination ‘for performance,’ and that harm can be redressed without reinstatement.”
He ordered 19 federal agencies, including the US Departments of Defence, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Energy, Interior, and Treasury, to correct the affected employees’ personnel records by 14 November and prohibited them from following OPM directives to dismiss workers.
Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in a statement that Alsup’s ruling “makes clear that thousands of probationary workers were wrongfully fired, exposes the sham record the government relied upon, and requires the government to tell the wrongly terminated employees that OPM’s reasoning for firing them was false.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday.
