San Francisco: A California federal judge on Thursday ordered six US agencies to reinstate thousands of recently-hired employees who lost their jobs as part of President Donald Trump’s purge of the federal workforce.

The ruling by US District Judge William Alsup during a hearing in San Francisco is the most significant blow yet to the effort by Trump and top adviser Elon Musk to drastically shrink the federal bureaucracy. Government agencies are facing a Thursday deadline to submit plans for a second wave of mass layoffs and to slash their budgets.

Alsup’s ruling applies to probationary employees at the US Depart­ment of Defence, Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy, Department of Interior and the Treasury Department.

The judge said the US Office of Personnel Management, the human resources department for federal agencies, had improperly ordered those agencies to fire workers en masse even though it lacked the power to do so. It is a sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well thats a lie, said Alsup, an appointee of Democratic President Bill Clinton.

The verdict is the most significant blow yet to efforts by US president and his adviser Elon Musk

Probationary workers typically have less than one year of service in their current roles, though some are longtime federal employees. They have fewer job protections than other government workers but in general can only be fired for performance issues.

Alsup ordered the agencies to reinstate workers who were fired over the last few weeks, pending the outcome of a lawsuit by unions, nonprofit groups, and the state of Washington. He did not order the 16 other agencies named in the lawsuit to reinstate workers, but said he would promptly issue a written decision that could expand on Thursday’s ruling.

A Department of Interior spokeswoman said the agency does not comment on litigation over personnel matters. The plaintiffs include the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 800,000 federal workers. The union’s president, Everett Kelley, in a statement said the decision was an important victory against “an administration hellbent on crippling federal agencies and their work on behalf of the American public.”

Workers

Alsup last month had temporarily blocked OPM from ordering agencies to fire probationary employees, but declined at the time to require that fired workers get their jobs back. The plaintiffs subsequently amended their lawsuit to include the agencies that fired probationary workers.

About 25,000 workers across the US government had been fired as of March 5, according to agency’stally, and another 75,000 have taken a buyout. The Trump administration has not released statistics on the firings, and it was not immediately clear how many employees could be affected by Thursday’s decision.

Published in Dawn, March 14th, 2025