A federal judge ruled on Thursday that probationary employees in 18 agencies fired by the Trump administration must be reinstated for at least two weeks.
Senior US District Judge James Bredar is now the second federal judge to rule against the mass layoffs after US District Judge William Alsup made a similar decision earlier on Thursday in a separate lawsuit.
In the earlier case, Alsup had ordered from San Francisco that the Trump administration has to reoffer jobs to thousands of fired workers across six Cabinet departments.
Bredar’s new temporary restraining order — from the Maryland district court — goes much wider.
His ruling targets 12 departments, including the Departments of Agriculture, Education, Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, Transportation, State, and Homeland Security. It did not cover the Defense Department, though Alsup’s ruling did.
Additionally, Bredar ordered reinstatement at six other agencies, including the US Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, both of which have been under immense pressure from the White House.
Bredar and Alsup didn’t buy into the Trump administration’s stated reason for firing employees without notice: that the workers’ individual performance or conduct wasn’t good enough.
“Here, the terminated probationary employees were plainly not terminated for cause,” Bredar wrote in his memo.
“The sheer number of employees that were terminated in a matter of days belies any argument that these terminations were due to the employees’ individual unsatisfactory performance or conduct,” he added.
Many of these cuts were made under the recommendations of the White House’s DOGE office, which has spearheaded President Donald Trump’s effort to reduce the federal workforce.
Reinstating jobs will be tough, but appropriate, judge says
Bredar, an Obama appointee, wrote that the 18 departments and agencies he named must reinstate their employees by Monday, March 17, at 1 p.m. ET.
Under this ruling, the terminations are to be suspended for 14 days.
Bredar added that he knew this would likely be a mammoth effort.
“When, as is likely the case here, the Government has engaged in an illegal scheme spanning broad swaths of the federal workforce, it is inevitable that the remediation of that scheme will itself be a significant task,” he wrote.
His ruling came as part of a lawsuit filed by a combined 20 Democratic state attorneys general against multiple branches of the federal government over employee terminations.
Their legal challenge argues that the Trump administration ignored protocol and bypassed federal laws requiring employers to notify state governments when conducting mass layoffs.
With their lawsuit proceeding, Bredar wrote in his memo that the court would likely soon consider a longer-term decision regarding the return of the probationary workers.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment about Bredar’s ruling sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.
But White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt blasted Alsup’s ruling on Thursday.
“A single judge is attempting to unconstitutionally seize the power of hiring and firing from the Executive Branch,” she said in a statement. “The President has the authority to exercise the power of the entire executive branch — singular district court judges cannot abuse the power of the entire judiciary to thwart the President’s agenda. If a federal district court judge would like executive powers, they can try and run for President themselves.”
Thursday’s rulings are among the first in a mounting series of high-profile legal challenges and orders seeking to regulate DOGE’s sweeping moves.
The agency was recently told by multiple judges to comply with requests for information about its operations.
As DOGE leads federal employee cuts, job terminations in the US government hit 172,017 in February, the highest monthly level since the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a wave of layoffs in June 2020.
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