President Donald Trump’s administration in court filings has for the first time acknowledged it fired nearly 25,000 recently hired workers, and said federal agencies were working to bring all of them back after a judge ruled their terminations were likely illegal.
The filings made in Baltimore, Maryland, federal court late Monday included statements from officials at 18 agencies, all of whom said the reinstated probationary workers were being placed on administrative leave at least temporarily.
The mass firings, part of Trump’s broader purge of the federal workforce, were widely reported, but the court filings are the administration’s first full accounting of the terminations.
Most of the agencies said they had fired a few hundred workers. The Treasury Department terminated 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 the filings.
On March 13, U.S. District Judge James Bredar said the mass firings of probationary workers that began last month were illegal, and ordered the workers reinstated pending further litigation.
The ruling did not block the agencies from firing workers, but took issue with the manner in which the mass firings were conducted. The court said agencies should have followed rules for conducting mass layoffs.
Probationary workers typically have less than one year of service in their current roles, though some are longtime federal employees.
Bredar, in a brief order on Tuesday, said it appeared the agencies “have made meaningful progress toward compliance” with his ruling. He ordered the agencies to update him on progress in reinstating workers by Monday afternoon, and said he expected “substantial compliance.”
Bredar’s ruling came in a lawsuit by 19 Democrat-led states and Washington, D.C., who said the mass firings would trigger a spike in unemployment claims and greater demand for social services provided by states.
The office of Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, which is spearheading the lawsuit, said it was reviewing the filings.
The Trump administration has appealed Bredar’s decision and on Monday asked a Richmond, Virginia-based appeals court to pause the ruling pending the outcome of the case.
Former probationary workers at the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services, the Internal Revenue Service, and the General Services Administration, told Reuters they had received emails saying they were being reinstated on full pay, but placed on administrative leave.
One probationary worker who had been reinstated at the GSA, which oversees government real estate, said he still expects to be ultimately fired, but being back on pay and benefits is a short-term reprieve. “My family has health insurance and gives me a little bit of runway to find what’s next,” he said.
San Francisco ruling
Hours before Bredar issued his March 13 ruling, a federal judge in San Francisco had ordered that probationary workers be reinstated at six agencies, including five also covered by Bredar’s order and the U.S. Department of Defense. The administration has also appealed that decision.
That judge, U.S. District Judge William Alsup, in an order on Monday criticized the administration’s decision to place probationary employees on administrative leave rather than send them back to work. He said that did not comply with his order to reinstate the workers because it would not restore the government services his order intended.
The U.S. Department of Justice, in a filing in response to Alsup on Tuesday, said placing workers on leave was the first in a series of steps toward fully reinstating them and “administrative leave is not being used to skirt the requirement of reinstatement.”
In the filings in Baltimore late Monday, agency officials said they had either reinstated all of the fired employees or were working to do so. They said bringing back large numbers of workers had caused confusion and turmoil.
The officials also noted that an appeals court ruling reversing Bredar’s order would allow agencies to again fire the workers, subjecting them to multiple changes in their employment status in a matter of weeks.
“The tremendous uncertainty associated with this confusion and these administrative burdens impede supervisors from appropriately managing their workforce,” Mark Green, deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of the Interior, wrote in one of the filings. “Work schedules and assignments are effectively being tied to hearing and briefing schedules set by the courts.”
Bredar has scheduled a hearing for March 26 on whether to keep his ruling in place pending the outcome of the lawsuit, which could take months or longer to resolve.
