Donald Trump at Manhattan Criminal Court, Thursday, May 30, 2024, in New York (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, Pool).
A federal judge in Maryland on Thursday evening ordered the Trump administration to rehire tens of thousands of recently terminated federal workers and issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting additional unlawful mass firings, becoming the second judge to issue such an order in the same day.
The sweeping 56-page ruling from Maryland-based U.S. District Judge James Bredar covers firings across 18 different agencies, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Department of Education, and Homeland Security. Bredar reasoned that the administration’s actions appeared to be an attempt to skirt statutory constraints regarding “reductions in force” (RIFs) by falsely claiming that each of the thousands of workers were fired for “performance or other individualized reason.”
“In this case, the government conducted massive layoffs, but it gave no advance notice,” the judge wrote. “It claims it wasn’t required to because, it says, it dismissed each one of these thousands of probationary employees for ‘performance’ or other individualized reasons. On the record before the Court, this isn’t true. There were no individualized assessments of employees. They were all just fired. Collectively. Accordingly, in the language of relevant laws, these big government layoffs were actually ‘Reductions in Force,’ or ‘RIFs.’ And, because these were ‘RIFs,’ they had to be preceded by notice to the states that would be impacted.”
The ruling came as the result of a lawsuit filed by 19 Democratic state attorneys general and Washington, D.C., which alleged that the Trump administration failed to follow procedures mandated by the Administrative Procedures Act for “reductions in force,” which require giving employees at least 60 days notice of mass terminations. Without such notice, the plaintiff States were not prepared for the impact resulting from the deluge of about 24,000 people being suddenly added their unemployed populations, Bredar said.
The ruling is yet another impediment to the Trump administration’s effort to gut the federal workforce at breakneck speed.
