Two Big Court Rulings

Federal district courts deal significant, concurrent blows to the administration’s mass firing campaign.

Photo: John McDonnell / AP

The Trump White House keeps losing in court. And that’s going to wind up mattering as the administration’s actions grow more extreme and the stakes grow ever higher.

On Thursday, federal judges delivered a one-two smackdown on the question of fired federal workers. Two back-to-back rulings by federal district courts, one on the West Coast and one on the East, found that the administration’s mass firing of probationary workers across numerous different agencies was illegal. And both ordered the federal government to immediately rehire all of those workers.

It’s the most significant pushback yet to the Trump administration’s efforts to radically downsize the federal workforce. Not only do the rulings restore thousands of jobs, one of them even enjoins the government from further “reductions in force” while the restraining order is in place, including the recently announced cuts to the Department of Education.

The rulings are great news for those workers covered. But they’re also great news for those monitoring how courts are handling the White House’s federal wrecking ball. It’s becoming clear to courts that the the government’s slash-and-burn efforts mask deep confusion about who actually had what authority to issue orders. And now, the government’s mad scramble to explain itself has resulted in trying to play hide-the-ball now with federal judges.

That’s a big no-no.

Judge Alsup wasn’t having it

In California, Judge William Alsup held a hearing on whether to issue a preliminary injunction against the government. At issue was the government’s sweeping order to fire all so-called “probationary” employees, which include not only employees who had been working for less than a year but also those with “probationary” status as they were awaiting a promotion.

There’s a right way and wrong way to fire federal employees, and the government chose the wrong one. The right way is to allow agencies to do the hiring and firing themselves. The wrong way is to have the order come down from the White House’s Office of Personnel Management.

But it was the way in which that order came down—and then how the government sought to obscure the truth, even from the court—that had Judge Alsup wanting to lift his robe and kick the defendants in the shins.

Plaintiffs had alleged that the probationary workers were the victims of a larger effort by DOGE to bulldoze the federal government and demoralize its employees. The OPM deployed a “loophole” to claim it was firing all probationary workers for “poor performance,” even if the employee had performed well on the job. Judge Allsup agreed, calling the move a “gimmick” and a “sham” to provide cover for mass firings.

“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 that’s a lie,” Judge Allsup remarked at the hearing.

When the government tried to defend the action, they got caught up in a lie, which they then made worse and worse.

Plaintiffs came forward with significant evidence showing that the acting director of OPM, one Charles Ezell, had forced agencies to lay off tens of thousands of employees. The government filed a declaration from Ezell in which he claimed he did not order a single firing and that, under his watch, OPM did not order any purges.

This was an outright lie, based on the documentary record. But the Ezell declaration was the only “evidence” that the government came forward with at all to rebut the allegations by plaintiffs.

Plaintiffs, who were likely astounded by the audacity of that lie, demanded a cross-examination of Ezell in court. The judge agreed, but then come Thursday, Ezell was a no-show. And then tried to swap out the apparently perjurious declaration by Ezell with a new one.

This was the kick-them-in-the-shins moment. Judge Allsup blasted the defense, saying “The government has tried to frustrate the judge’s ability to get at the truth of what happened here and set forth a sham declaration, then withdrew it, then substituted another. That’s not the way it works in the U.S. District Court.”

Here’s a gem of a rant by the judge at the defense:

“You will not bring the people in here to be cross-examined. You’re afraid to do so because you know cross-examination would reveal the truth. This is the U.S. District Court. Whenever you submit declarations, those people should be submitted to the cross-examination, just like the plaintiffs’ side should be. Then we get at the truth. … I tend to doubt that you’re telling me the truth whenever we hear all the evidence eventually. Why can’t you bring your people in to be cross-examined or deposed at their convenience? I said two hours for Mr. Ezell. A deposition at his convenience. And you withdrew his declaration rather than do that? Come on. That’s a sham. It upsets me, I want you to know that. I’ve been practicing in this court for over 50 years and I know how we get at the truth. And you’re not helping me get at the truth. You’re giving me press releases, sham documents. I’m getting mad.”

The judge, now indeed quite mad, granted the preliminary injunction and ordered the government to rehire workers across six agencies.

But he went one step further. Earlier in the case, Judge Allsup had ruled that the union plaintiffs had not exhausted their administrative remedies, so he couldn’t hear their claims. Those remedies included filing claims with the Office of Special Counsel, the Merit Systems Protection Board, and the Federal Labor Relations Authority. Judge Allsup just didn’t have jurisdiction to hear the unions’ claims until those remedies had been exhausted.

But Judge Allsup correctly observed that the White House has made such a process futile by hamstringing those very review processes. Specifically, Trump had fired Hampton Dellinger, who headed up the OSC, as well as removing leaders of the MSPB and the FLRA. Cases challenging those firings are tied up in court, and Judge Allsup recognized that Trump had “ruined” the normal process for workers to file grievances.

As Mark Joseph Stern of Slate noted in discussing Judge Allsup’s decision to revisit his ability to hear the claims of the union plaintiffs, calling it “important” because

it would really strike a blow against the catch-22 in which the Trump administration has tried to trap the civil servants and unions. The administration illegally laid off all of these workers, then simultaneously made it impossible for them to object to their illegal terminations by hobbling the agencies that were designed to protect them. Judge Alsup sees this more clearly than any other judge to consider the issue; he said he was “misled” by the government about the “efficacy” of these agencies. He knows there’s funny business going on here and he has reached the limit of his tolerance for it.

The administration has appealed Judge Allsup’s ruling to the Ninth Circuit. The shenanigans by the OPM are likely to sour the appellate courts to defendants’ arguments and reduce their chance of success. There is often a steep price to pay when you deceive the trial court or play hide-the-ball with chief witnesses. Indeed, Judge Allsup would probably have been within his rights to order summary judgment for the plaintiffs in light of these antics, but in any event it is now significantly less likely that he will be overturned on appeal.

Judge Brader sweeps wide

In Maryland, Judge James Bredar issued a 54-page order similarly restoring jobs to thousands of fired probationary workers. His temporary restraining order, which is good for two weeks while the parties prepare for a hearing on a longer preliminary injunction, affects probationary workers across a whopping 18 different federal agencies.

Judge Bredar explained a few important parts of his ruling. His reasoning for finding the layoffs illegal was straightfoward:

In this case, the government conducted massive layoffs, but it gave no advance notice. 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.

That lack of notice to the plaintiffs’ states meant that they weren’t ready to absorb the impact of so many laid off federal workers, who would then seek unemployment claims from their states. The states were overwhelmed by the sudden and unannounced layoffs. “They are still scrambling to catch up. They remain impaired in their capacities to meet their legal obligations to their citizens,” Bredar wrote.

He also explained why he was empowered to issue a temporary restraining order that would rewind the clock to the moment just before the mass firings:

[T]he “status quo,” for purposes of injunctive relief, “is not the circumstances existing at the moment the lawsuit or injunction request was actually filed, but the last uncontested status between the parties which preceded the controversy.”

That status was the moment before the firings began. The government claimed that the court didn’t have the power to mandate that the government rehire the workers, but Judge Bredar disagreed.

[T]he Court is asked to order the Government to preserve the situation that existed before it embarked on the likely illegal mass terminations without providing requisite notice to the States. Although such an order will inevitably require the Government to take affirmative steps to comply, it nevertheless fits comfortably within the scope of the Court’s TRO authority.

Finally, Judge Bredar also answered why a nationwide order was necessary in this case, rather than geographically limited to where specific plaintiffs reside:

[H]ere, the challenged dismissals without notice apply to federal workers spread throughout the United States. When, as is likely the case here, the Government’s policy is violative of the law across the board, it is appropriate for injunctive relief to be nationwide in scope, rather than limited to specific plaintiffs.

Judge Bredar laid all this out likely with a keen understanding of what the Trump administration is next up to. In a separate filing yesterday with the Supreme Court, the White House argued that single federal district court judges shouldn’t have the power to issue national injunctions against the government, even though conservative judges have done precisely this before.

It’s a dangerous attempt to limit the power of federal courts and to keep rulings like those of Judges Allsup and Bredar from having a nationwide effect and constraint upon the White House’s actions.

But what if the government doesn’t comply?

A final word about the question of possible noncompliance by the administration. With every court order, there is the risk that Trump or one of his agency heads or cabinet officials will choose simply to ignore the ruling. So far, the administration’s preferred tactic has been to try and delay, confuse and skirt rulings with technicalities and distractions.

Judges are growing increasingly angry and are learning from each other’s experiences. Every federal judge in the country has likely heard about Judge Alsup’s experience with the declarant who failed to show and tried to substitute a new sworn affidavit. They’ve all heard about other judges’ frustrations in finding their orders had not been obeyed on things like impounded funds, and they are buoyed by a recent 5-4 Supreme Court decision allowing a federal district court to fashion a reasonable timetable for the USAID to disburse some two billion dollars in overdue payments that had been frozen.

So far, the administration has sought to appeal orders it doesn’t agree with rather than flout them entirely. This makes some perverse sense because the whole point of the “shock and awe” barrage of executive orders was not to prevail on every one but to hope one or two snuck through and got rubberstamped by the radical majority on the Supreme Court.

It’s unlikely that the Trump White House will want to risk a showdown with the federal courts over probationary workers. These rulings come at the very moment Trump is seeking to test new powers to arbitrarily detain green card holders, invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1789, or impose what amounts to massive taxes through tariffs authorized under a bogus claim of “national emergency” over border migration and fentanyl, and he’s already lost once before the Supreme Court over the question of impoundment.

So while there’s always a lurking danger that Trump will openly defy the courts and set off a larger constitutional crisis, for now he seems satisfied with simply moving on to the next outrageous, unconstitutional thing, while poking and prodding the Court to see if he can win something as big as the immunity ruling they handed him in 2024.

After all, why defy the Supreme Court if you can actually get them to affirm your broad powers?

So for now, we’ll continue to watch his moves closely, to meet them with forceful legal pushback, and to attempt to not just limit but undo some of the damage he and Elon Musk have already caused.