In the US, a federal judge on February 27 ordered the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to reverse directives that initiated mass layoffs of government employees who were on probation.
The Washington Post writes about this.
The US District Judge William Alsup ordered OPM to rescind its previous directives for more than 20 agencies, including the Department of Defense, the Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Science Foundation, and others.
“Congress has given the authority to hire and fire employees to the departments themselves. The Department of Defense, for example, has the statutory authority to hire and fire. The Office of Personnel Management has no authority, under any law in the history of the universe, to hire and fire employees of another department. They can hire and fire their own employees,” the judge said.
The decision was made after a lawsuit from a group of unions and human rights organizations led by the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents nearly 800 000 federal employees across the country.
The lawsuit alleged that OPM violated the law when it ordered government agencies in mid-February to fire all probationary employees, meaning those in their first or second year on the job. In some cases, long-serving employees who start new jobs are also classified as probationary employees.
According to unions, tens of thousands of workers have already been laid off, often with people being fired via email from OPM that falsely states the reasons.
- After Donald Trump became the US president, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was launched in Washington under the leadership of billionaire Elon Musk. This structure should increase the efficiency of the American government in a year and a half. As part of the governmentʼs spending cuts, the US government, among other things, suspended aid programs to other countries and offered federal officials the opportunity to resign and receive compensation.
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