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EPA, NOAA Reinstate Probationary Employees Following Court Order
In response to a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) issued by a federal judge in Maryland, the Trump administration last week reinstated nearly 25,000 probationary federal employees who had been laid off in February. Court filings show how many employees were let go from each agency, including:
- 419 at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
- 555 at the Department of Energy
- 791 at the Department of Commerce, the vast majority of whom worked at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric administration (NOAA), and 27 of whom had already been reinstated “within days of their terminations for various operational reasons.”
- 1,712 at the Department of the Interior, including 370 at the Fish and Wildlife Service
The federal workers have been put on administrative leave “as part of a phased plan for return-to-duty," so they are back on payroll, but are not yet able to work or access email. Workers are receiving back pay to the date of their firing, but because of ambiguous language in the reinstatement email, many are worried that they may have to pay it back if the Trump administration eventually wins the case.
It is not clear whether the Trump administration intends to put these employees back to work barring additional judicial orders. In multiple court filings, the administration claims that is their intention, but does not appear to have taken further action to fully reinstate these employees. Further, the administration complained in the above filing that “reinstatement of removed employees to full duty status would impose substantial burdens on EPA, cause significant confusion, and cause turmoil for the terminated employees.”
In the Great Lakes, fired probationary employees at NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory and EPA’s region 5 office in Chicago are among those covered by the TRO. The Trump administration, through the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), has targeted probationary employees in their efforts to reduce the size of the federal bureaucracy. These employees have fewer civil service protections than other federal employees and have been at their job for one or two years or fewer. This does not necessarily mean that these employees are inexperienced; among the firings are longtime employees who were recently promoted, putting them on probationary status.
The Trump administration has until 1:00 PM on Tuesday to update the court on their progress complying with the order ahead of a preliminary injunction hearing on Wednesday. As of last week, the administration said that it had succeeded in reinstating nearly all employees, but had run into some hurdles, including cases in which some agencies could not find personal contact information for some employees and had issues with HR software.
In a separate case filed in California, a judge issued a nationwide injunction ordering that federal workers should be put back to work, and found that the Trump administration’s use of administrative leave did not comply with his order. That case applies to about 16,000 workers in a smaller subset of agencies: the Departments of Agriculture (5,714 fired employees), Defense (364), Energy (555), Interior (1,712), Treasury (7,613), and Veterans Affairs (1,683). The Trump administration is in the process of complying with that order, and is due to update the court on their progress by this Friday, March 28th, but earlier today filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court in an attempt to block the injunction.
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