The Trump administration suffered another judicial setback on Thursday night regarding the layoffs of federal workers.
In a ruling late Thursday, U.S. District Judge James Bredar blocked the administration’s order of mass layoffs of probationary federal workers, multiple sources reported. It was the second such ruling against the president’s job cuts that day.
Bredar’s decision means, for the time being, the employees who lost their jobs due to the administration’s cuts will be reinstated. Eighteen agencies were covered in the order, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Commerce Department, the Education Department, the Energy Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Homeland Security, the Labor Department, the State Department, the Transportation Department, and the Treasury Department.
Bredar is a judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland. He was appointed by then-President Barack Obama in 2010.
“When the federal government terminates large numbers of its employees, including those still on probation because they were recently hired or promoted, it must follow certain rules,” Bredar wrote in the court order. “Some of those rules are intended to help states manage the consequences of sudden, mass layoffs. Workers who unexpectedly lose their jobs often need immediate assistance — in applying for unemployment, in searching for new jobs, and in obtaining essential social services — and Congress and the government itself recognized as much when they crafted rules meant to give states advance notice of big layoffs.”
“In this case, the government conducted massive layoffs, but it gave no advance notice,” the court order reads. “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.”
Bredar then noted that these mass terminations, without notice and with the government’s reasoning for the layoffs, are against the law.
“Accordingly, in the language of relevant laws, these big government layoffs were actually ‘Reductions in Force,’ or ‘RIFs,’” Bredar wrote. “And, because they were ‘RIFs,’ they had to be preceded by notice to the states that would be impacted.”
Since the administration’s layoffs were conducted in the way Bredar specified violated the law, he ruled to reverse the job cuts.
“Because the federal government’s recent discharge of thousands of probationary employees was not executed in compliance with rules intended to ensure that states are ready to bear the load cast upon them when mass layoffs occur, and because the Plaintiff States are not yet in fact so prepared, and this because of the violations, the recent directives of various federal agencies terminating probationary employees must be stayed,” Bredar ordered.
JUDGE REINSTATES THOUSANDS OF FEDERAL WORKERS AND SLAMS TRUMP’S ‘SHAM’ LAYOFFS
He ruled that the order would last for 14 days, at which point “the Court will likely consider an application for a preliminary or longer-term injunction.”
Bredar’s ruling was more extensive than the one handed down by U.S. District Judge William Alsup earlier in the day, which only reinstated workers at six federal agencies.
