By Daniel Wiessner
(Reuters) – A U.S. appeals court on Wednesday refused to pause a judge’s ruling requiring the administration of President Donald Trump to reinstate more than 17,000 workers at six agencies who lost their jobs as part of Trump’s purge of the federal workforce.
A 2-1 panel of the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the Trump administration had failed to establish a federal judge erred by finding that agencies likely could not fire workers at the direction of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the human resources department for the federal government.
The Trump administration in court filings on March 17 said that the agencies were working to reinstate the fired employees, while temporarily placing them on paid leave. Wednesday’s decision will be in place pending the outcome of the administration’s appeal.
The administration has also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to pause the judge’s ruling.
The decision applies to the Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy, Department of the Interior and the Treasury Department.
Probationary employees typically have less than one year, and sometimes less than two years, of service in their current roles, though some are longtime federal employees.
The mass firings of probationary workers was the first step in broader efforts by Trump and top adviser Elon Musk to drastically shrink the federal workforce and slash government spending.
Most agencies have said that they fired a few hundred probationary workers, but others terminated far more. The Treasury Department fired more than 7,600 people, the Department of Agriculture about 5,700, and the Department of Veterans Affairs and Interior Department about 1,700 each, according to court filings.
On March 13, U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco said that OPM, which is closely tied to the White House, improperly ordered the six agencies to fire the workers even though it has no power to do so.
On the same day, a judge in Baltimore, Maryland separately ordered that 25,000 probationary workers at 18 agencies be reinstated, but on different legal grounds. That case involves all of the agencies subject to Alsup’s order except for the Department of Defense, which said it had fired about 360 probationary employees.
The Trump administration has appealed that decision. A Richmond, Virginia-based appeals court recently refused to pause the ruling pending the outcome of the case.
The judges’ rulings did not bar agencies from firing probationary workers at all, but took issue with the manner in which the terminations were conducted.
(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York; additional reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Cynthia Osterman)
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