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Two federal judges have ordered the Trump administration to rehire tens of thousands of government employees sacked in recent weeks, in a significant legal setback to Elon Musk’s aggressive cost-cutting drive.
Across both cases, the Trump administration was ordered to restore probationary employees throughout 19 federal agencies. The judges determined that the workers had been fired in breach of rules surrounding mass lay-offs of government employees.
On Thursday night, Maryland district judge James Bredar issued a temporary restraining order directing the government to reinstate employees at agencies including the US Treasury, the energy and commerce departments, and the all-but-shuttered Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and US Agency for International Development.
“The terminated probationary employees were plainly not terminated for cause” despite the federal government insisting they were, wrote Bredar in a memorandum accompanying his order.
He also found that the federal government gave “no advance notice” of what were in effect reductions in force, which harmed states that “weren’t ready for the impact of so many unemployed people”.
Bredar noted that the states which sued the federal government alleged at least 24,000 probationary workers had been fired.
Earlier on Thursday, San Francisco district judge William Alsup demanded the immediate reinstatement of probationary employees across six agencies, including the defence department, after representatives of government workers argued they had been unlawfully fired.
Alsup found that the Office of Personnel Management, a government human resources agency that has been one of the primary vehicles used by Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), had no legal authority to order such dismissals.
At a hearing on Thursday, Alsup also criticised the US government for failing to send the OPM’s acting director or any other official to answer questions about the recent lay-offs — despite an explicit request by the court — and expressed doubt about the Trump administration’s claim that those fired had been underperforming in their roles.
“The law is clear that OPM has no authority to order the federal agencies to fire their employees,” said Danielle Leonard, a lawyer at Altshuler Berzon representing the plaintiffs. “Today’s ruling is an important first step in holding this administration accountable.”
The court orders are the latest in a series of blows to Doge’s cost-cutting crusade. This month, the Supreme Court upheld an order forcing the government to pay $2bn worth of foreign aid contracts that the Trump administration had attempted to cancel, while judges in lower courts have prevented Musk’s emissaries from accessing some sensitive information.
The US government has also moved to clarify a directive issued soon after Trump’s inauguration regarding probationary employees, emphasising that it is up to individual agencies to make personnel decisions.
Trump last week urged Musk to use a “scalpel” rather than a “hatchet” to identify savings, after the scale and breadth of cuts and lay-offs prompted protest even from Republican lawmakers.
In a statement regarding Alsup’s order, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt accused the judge of “attempting to unconstitutionally seize the power of hiring and firing from the executive branch”.
“If a federal district court judge would like executive powers, they can try and run for president themselves,” she said. “The Trump administration will immediately fight back against this absurd and unconstitutional order.”
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