A federal judge ordered Thursday that the Office of Personnel Management rescinded previous instructions indicating federal agencies that “determine quickly if these employees must be held in the agency.”
The instructions, communicated in a memorandum of January 20 and an internal email on February 14, are “illegal” and “must be arrested, rescinded,” said Judge William Alsup, in the northern district of California, said from the bank.
The ruling does not restore the dismissed employees.
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The judge instructed the Office of Personnel Management to communicate with the Department of Defense on Friday, before the expected test terminations, which has ruled that they are not valid.
ALSUP has also ordered a scheduled hearing in which the Director of Personnel Management of the Interim Office Charles Ezell will testify. The moment of that audience is not clear.
“The staff management office has no authority under any statute in the history of the Universe, to hire and fire employees within another agency,” Alsup said Thursday night. “You can hire your own employees, yes. You can shoot them. But cannot order or direct another agency to do it. “
“OPM has no authority to tell any agency in the United States government, apart from themselves, who can already hire who can shoot, point. So, for merit, I think, we start with that important proposal, ”he said.
Alsup called the test employees “the soul of our government.”
“They enter the low level and make their way, and this is how we renew and reinvent ourselves,” he said.
Test workers are employees who are recent employees or, sometimes, life employees who were recently transferred to new positions.
“The government’s position, for the first time in the history of the United States, is that these employees can be fired at will,” said a lawyer of the plaintiffs, Danielle Leonard. “That is not the law, honor. Employees and trial agencies have obligations before saying goodbye to test employees. “
“The government should not operate in secret when it comes to wholesale orders to fire so many people,” Leonard begged before the court.
There was a significant disagreement about whether the OPM phone call to the agencies that instructed the dismissal of trial employees in mid -February was an “order” or a “application.”
“Something aberrational happens, not only in an agency, but throughout the government, in many agencies the same day, the same. You don’t think someone ordered to happen, instead of ‘Oh, we just got guidance’, Alsup nominated the United States prosecutor Kelsey Helland, who was the only representative of the Government at the hearing.
“An order is not usually written as a request,” said Helland. “Ask is not ordering to do something.”
Helland suggested that impacted employees should pass through the Special Advisor Office or the Merit Systems Protection Board to combat their work status, and that a temporary restriction order such as this would be unnecessary.
“Are they really having this court that all these federal employees are lying, their honor?” Leonard asked. “That is what the advice says. I don’t think it’s credible. “
An OPM spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comments on Thursday night.
According to OPM data, hundreds of thousands of people could have been affected by the Trump administration directives, although the exact number of people who were completed was not clear immediately.
Everett Kelley, the national president of the American Federation of Government employees, one of the unions that the case brought, described the ruling “an important initial victory for the patriotic Americans in this country who were illegally fired from their work by an agency that had no authority to do so.”
“The OPM address to the agencies to participate in the indiscriminate dismissal of federal proof employees is illegal, simple and simple, and our union will continue to fight until we stop these demoralizing and harmful attacks to our civil service once and for all,” Kelley said in a statement.
Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said: “We know that this decision is just a first step, but it gives federal employees a respite … We will continue advancing with this case with our partners until federal workers are protected against these unfounded terminations.”
