A federal judge in Maryland granted a partial preliminary injunction halting the layoffs of tens of thousands of probationary federal workers and preventing the Trump administration from making mass layoffs of employees in 19 states and the District of Columbia without properly informing the jurisdictions first.
The ruling will, for now, allow about 24,500 probationary federal workers to keep their jobs. Probationary employees typically have been in their positions for less than a year.
The partial injunction only pertains to the 19 states and D.C., which sued the White House over harm done to them by the layoffs.
The states say they had to set up impromptu websites and provide unemployment benefits to the newly laid off workers.
States must be informed 60 days prior to reductions in force to prepare for mass unemployment, according to federal law.
“When the Trump administration fired tens of thousands of federal probationary employees, they claimed it was due to poor work performance. We know better. This was a coordinated effort to eliminate the federal workforce — even if it meant breaking the law,” said Maryland Attorney General Anthoney Brown in statement Tuesday night. “These mass layoffs forced hardworking civil servants and their families into financial insecurity, a sudden and unexpected crisis that risked overwhelming our State’s ability to help the unemployed.”
U.S. District Court for Maryland Judge James Bredar seemed to struggle with the scope of the injunction and whether or not it needed to extend to the entire nation.
During arguments for the injunction, Bredar kept returning to the issue of why states that were not suing needed relief from the administration’s actions.
In the end, he chose to limit the injunction’s powers for future layoffs to the plaintiff states.
A federal judge in San Francisco made a broader ruling in mid-March issuing an injunction against the Office of Personnel Management. That ruling was focused more on how the probationary workers were fired than the impact on the states.
