A federal judge has ordered the Office of Personnel Management to rescind “illegal” instructions to cull the workforce of federal agencies.
In an email sent across agencies on February 14, OPM instructed agency heads to “separate probationary employees you have not identified as mission-critical.”
U.S. District Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California issued an order Thursday saying the directions were unlawful overreach by the OPM and “should be stopped, rescinded.”
“The Office of Personnel Management does not have any authority whatsoever under any statute in the history of the universe, to hire and fire employees within another agency,” Alsup said. “It can hire its own employees, yes. Can fire them. But it cannot order or direct some other agency to do so.”
“OPM has no authority to tell any agency in the United States government, other than itself, who they can hire and who they can fire, period. So on the merits, I think, we start with that important proposition,” he said.
Alsup stopped short of ordering the reinstatement of ousted probationary employees; rather, he ordered the OPM to reverse its order requiring mass terminations and inform federal agencies that it had no authority to require them to shrink their workforce.
The judge also called for a hearing, at which the acting OPM Director Charles Ezell will testify. It is not yet clear when exactly that hearing will be.
Alsup defended the scores of probationary employees threatened by the OPM’s order as “the lifeblood of our government.”
“They come in at the low level and they work their way up, and that’s how we renew ourselves and reinvent ourselves,” Alsup said.
Previous rounds of government-wide layoffs recommended by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have specifically targeted probationary employees, who have been employed for less than a year and therefore lack the job protections of their colleagues.
Despite the fact that, by law, agencies can only fire probationary employees if their “performance or conduct demonstrates that they are unfit for federal employment,” a review by the Office of Special Counsel found that agencies had fired their employees without specifying an issue with their work, and in some cases without referring to their work at all.
For that very reason, the Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent federal board, granted a request from the OSC Tuesday to pause the termination of six employees, which could potentially be extended to save more wrongfully terminated federal workers.
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