Probationary employees at the Interior Department who were targeted for mass firings earlier this year can now bring a class-action lawsuit challenging their treatment, a federal board ruled.
The Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent, quasi-judicial executive branch agency, ruled Friday that 1,700 federal workers qualify as a class and can collectively challenge the Trump administration’s mass firings in early February.
“This is a critical milestone for the nearly 2,000 employees who were illegally fired from DOI,” said Danny Rosenthal, a partner at the firm James and Hoffman. The Interior employees are also represented by attorneys with Brown Goldstein Levy; Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll; and Gilbert Employment Law.
That group includes National Park Service employees and other agencies within Interior. It remains unclear how many of the fired workers have returned to their jobs in the wake of the various court rulings that ordered the rehiring of those probationary workers as well as corrections to their employment records.
