Thousands of fired workers at the Department of Agriculture must get their jobs back for at least the next month and a half, the chair of a federal civil service board ruled Wednesday.
The ruling said the recent dismissals of more than 5,600 probationary employees may have violated federal laws and procedures for carrying out layoffs.
The decision from Cathy Harris, the chair of the Merit Systems Protection Board, is a blow to the Trump administration’s effort to drastically and quickly shrink the federal bureaucracy. Though it applies only to the USDA, it could lay the groundwork for further rulings reinstating tens of thousands of other probationary workers whom the Trump administration has fired en masse across the government.
But it’s far from a final resolution of the legality of the mass terminations. The administration may have further options to place the reinstated workers on administrative leave or fire them again as part of a formal “reduction in force.”
