Three cheers! From The New York Times:
Judge blocks Trump administration’s mass firings of federal workers
A federal judge ruled that the terminations at several agencies, including the Department of Defense, were likely illegal.
“Congress has given the authority to hire and fire to the agencies themselves. The Department of Defense, for example, has statutory authority to hire and fire,” Alsup said from the bench as he handed down the ruling Thursday evening in San Francisco federal court. “The Office of Personnel Management does not have any authority whatsoever under any statute in the history of the universe to hire and fire employees at another agency. They can hire and fire their own employees.”
A group of union plaintiffs and advocacy organizations led by the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents about 800,000 federal workers nationwide, argued in legal filings that the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) broke the law when it ordered government agencies in mid-February to fire all probationary employees, defined as those who are in the first or second year on the job.
The United States employs about 200,000 such workers, which represents about 10 percent of its civilian federal workforce. Tens of thousands already have been dismissed, often with a template email provided by OPM that falsely cites performance reasons for the terminations, the unions said. Trump and other administration officials have said the cuts are meant to reduce the size of the federal workforce.
“OPM, the federal agency charged with implementing this nation’s employment laws, in one fell swoop has perpetrated one of the most massive employment frauds in the history of this country, telling tens of thousands of workers that they are being fired for performance reasons, when they most certainly were not,” attorneys for the unions said in a court filing.
Many of the employees “had received excellent performance reviews” and were terminated without input from their supervisors, the unions said. Swept up in the cuts were vital employees in charge of forest-fire prevention in California, as well as Federal Aviation Administration workers in airports across the country, staff providing support services to veterans and researchers at the National Science Foundation.
“OPM lacks constitutional, statutory, or regulatory power to order other federal agencies to terminate employees who Congress authorized those agencies to hire and manage,” attorneys for the unions said.
In response to the lawsuit, the Justice Department and the acting OPM director, Charles Ezell, said the unions lacked legal standing to challenge the firings in court and should take their claims to the Federal Labor Relations Authority, a panel of presidential appointees, or the Merit Systems Protection Board. The latter board halted the terminations of six probationary employees in a ruling issued this week, which could have wider implications for the larger pool of thousands of fired probationary employees.
The Justice Department argued that the president has “inherent constitutional authority” to decide “how best to manage the Executive Branch, including whom to hire and remove, what conditions to place on continued employment, and what processes to employ in making these determinations.” Ezell said in a court filing that “only the highest-performing probationers in mission-critical areas demonstrate the necessary fitness or qualifications for continued employment.”
Alsup was skeptical of that argument.
“How could so much of the workforce be amputated, suddenly, overnight? It’s so irregular and so widespread and so aberrant in the history of our country. How could this all happen with each agency deciding on its own to do something so aberrational?” said Alsup, who was appointed to the bench by President Bill Clinton in 1999. “I don’t believe it.”
The Trump administration attorneys also claimed in court papers that OPM had not ordered federal agencies to fire specific employees and did not create a “mass termination program” but rather a “focused review” process. However, multiple agency officials — from the Defense and Agriculture departments, IRS, Veterans Affairs and National Science Foundation — have said OPM ordered them to fire probationary workers, according to court records.
“No federal agency had announced any terminations of probationary employees in the positions each agency carefully vetted, authorized, and hired employees to perform, prior to OPM’s order,” the unions said in a legal filing. They added that OPM barely gave officials a chance to justify keeping probationary staff: “OPM required agencies to adhere to a 200-character limit in any explanation provided as to why any individual employee should be retained by the agency.”
A federal judge in D.C. last week denied a similar request for a temporary restraining order filed by government worker unions, ruling that he did not have legal jurisdiction to hear the case and that the unions should take their challenge to the Federal Labor Relations Authority. Trump fired the chairwoman of that agency before her term expired in July. In the meantime, the authority consists of one Republican appointee and one Democratic appointee.
1 comment:
Putin invaded Ukraine because he didn't like a military alliance between democratic nations. Russia is not a democracy but an authoritarian regime. It will be Russia who started WW3 if that happens... not Ukraine and the USA. Trump is an idiot.
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