By Daniel Wiessner
(Reuters) – A U.S. appeals court on Friday refused to pause a judge’s ruling requiring the administration of President Donald Trump to reinstate 25,000 workers at 18 federal agencies who lost their jobs as part of Trump’s purge of the federal workforce.
A panel of the Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said there was no reason to pause the decision because the judge in Baltimore, Maryland is expected to decide next week whether to extend it further, in a lawsuit brought by 19 Democrat-led states and Washington, D.C.
The Trump administration in court filings on March 17 said that the agencies were working to reinstate the fired employees, while temporarily placing them on paid leave. Friday’s decision will be in place pending the outcome of the administration’s appeal.
The 18 agencies involved in the case include the Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services and the Treasury Department.
Probationary employees typically have less than one year, and sometimes less than two years, of service in their current roles, though some are longtime federal employees.
The mass firings of probationary workers was the first step in broader efforts by Trump and top adviser Elon Musk to drastically shrink the federal workforce and slash government spending.
Most agencies have said that they fired a few hundred probationary workers, but others terminated far more. The Treasury Department fired 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 court filings.
On March 13, U.S. District Judge James Bredar in Baltimore, Maryland said the agencies should have followed procedures for conducting mass layoffs and ordered that the workers be reinstated pending further litigation.
On the same day, a judge in San Francisco separately ordered that probationary workers at six agencies be reinstated, but on different legal grounds. That case involves five of the agencies subject to Bredar’s ruling and the U.S. Department of Defense.
The Trump administration has appealed that decision and asked a San Francisco-based appeals court to pause it pending the outcome of the case.
The judges’ rulings did not bar agencies from firing probationary workers at all but took issue with the manner in which the terminations were conducted.
(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Cynthia Osterman)
