A federal judge in the U.S. ruled against the government's wholesale firings of federal workers Thursday, which were included in a workforce reduction initiative led by Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the media reports.
The judge directed the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to undo orders that resulted in the mass termination of workers in several federal agencies.
"The Office of Personnel Management has absolutely no legal authority—under any statute in existence—to hire or fire employees in another agency," U.S. District Judge William Alsup wrote, according to The Washington Post.
Alsup made clear that Congress has given individual agencies the discretion to make hiring and firing decisions, pointing to the Department of Defense as an example of an agency with statutory authority to manage its own employees.
Legal Setback for Trump's Federal Workforce Overhaul
The ruling is another legal hurdle for Trump's efforts to transform the federal government. It comes after a string of judicial decisions against his policies, such as a recent court injunction halting his refugee ban and a stay of his executive order to end birthright citizenship.
Thursday's decision was in response to lawsuits brought by unions and advocacy groups, which claimed that the order to fire all probationary federal workers was illegal.
In the federal system, workers in their first or second year of service—no matter what promotions they may have received—are classified as probationary, leaving them especially susceptible to large-scale layoffs.
The order had sweeping implications, affecting tens of thousands of employees.
Legal Challenge Calls OPM's Action "Employment Fraud"
Plaintiffs' lawyers severely criticized the OPM's move, terming it one of the largest cases of job fraud in the history of the United States.
"OPM, the same agency that is tasked with administering this country's employment laws, has staged one of the greatest employment scams ever conceived," lawyers maintained in their court document, reports The Washington Post.
They also claimed that OPM "has no constitutional, statutory, or regulatory basis to require federal agencies to fire employees whom Congress explicitly authorized them to hire and oversee."
This decision leaves the government's plan for restructuring its workforce with another significant legal barrier.
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