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The Trump administration in court filings has for the first time acknowledged that it fired nearly 25,000 recently hired workers, and said federal agencies were working to bring all of them back after a judge ruled that their terminations were likely illegal.
The filings made in Baltimore, Maryland, federal court late Monday included statements from officials at 18 agencies, all of whom said the reinstated probationary workers were being placed on administrative leave at least temporarily.
The mass firings, part of President Donald Trump’s broader purge of the federal workforce, were widely reported, but the court filings are the first full accounting of the terminations by the administration.
Most of the agencies said they had fired a few hundred workers. The Treasury Department terminated about 7,600 people, the Department of Agriculture about 5,700 and the Department of Health and Human Services more than 3,200, according to the filings.
U.S. District Judge James Bredar said on March 13 that the mass firings of probationary workers that began last month violated regulations governing the mass layoffs of federal employees, and ordered them to be reinstated pending further litigation.
Probationary workers typically have less than one year of service in their current roles, though some are longtime federal employees.
Bredar in a brief order on Tuesday said it appeared that the agencies “have made meaningful progress toward compliance” with his ruling. He ordered the agencies to update him on their progress in reinstating workers by Monday afternoon, and said he expected “substantial compliance.”
Bredar’s ruling came in a lawsuit by 19 Democrat-led states and Washington, D.C., who said the mass firings would trigger a spike in unemployment claims and greater demand for social services provided by states.
The office of Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, which is spearheading the lawsuit, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
The Trump administration has appealed Bredar’s decision and on Monday asked a Richmond, Virginia-based appeals court to pause the ruling pending the outcome of the case.
SAN FRANCISCO RULING
Hours before Bredar issued his ruling, a federal judge in San Francisco had ordered that probationary workers be reinstated at six agencies, including five also covered by Bredar’s order and the U.S. Department of Defense. The administration has also appealed that decision.
That judge, U.S. District Judge William Alsup, in an order on Monday criticized the fact that the Trump administration appeared not to be sending fired probationary employees back to work, but is instead placing them on administrative leave. He said that did not comply with his order to reinstate the workers because it would not restore the government services his order intended.
Alsup ordered the government agencies that are defendants in the case he is overseeing to state by Tuesday the extent to which previously fired probationary workers are being placed on administrative leave.
The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union with 800,000 members, which is one of the plaintiffs in the case before Alsup, referred Reuters to his order when asked for comment.
In the Baltimore filings late Monday, agency officials said they had either reinstated all of the fired employees or were working to do so, but warned that bringing back large numbers of workers had imposed significant burdens and caused confusion and turmoil.
The officials also noted that an appeals court ruling reversing Bredar’s order would allow agencies to again fire the workers, subjecting them to multiple changes in their employment status in a matter of weeks.
“The tremendous uncertainty associated with this confusion and these administrative burdens impede supervisors from appropriately managing their workforce,” Mark Green, deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of the Interior, wrote in one of the filings. “Work schedules and assignments are effectively being tied to hearing and briefing schedules set by the courts.”
Bredar has scheduled a hearing for March 26 on whether to keep his ruling in place pending the outcome of the lawsuit, which could take months or longer to resolve.
(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York; Additional reporting by Tim Reid in Washington; Editing by Nick Zieminski, Alexia Garamfalvi, Mark Porter and Marguerita Choy)
