A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration crossed legal lines when it pushed through mass terminations of U.S. government employees, striking at the careers of thousands. Yet despite finding the firings unlawful, the court stopped short of returning workers to their posts.
The case centered on a sweeping directive issued by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in early 2025, ordering federal agencies to dismiss tens of thousands of probationary employees in one stroke. Many of those affected had less than a year of service, though some were long-serving federal workers who had recently shifted roles.
Judge William Alsup, presiding in San Francisco, made it clear that OPM’s actions were illegal. In his order, he acknowledged that normally such a directive would be undone and workers restored. But the Supreme Court, he noted, had already made plain through its emergency rulings that courts have little power to interfere with federal hiring and firing decisions.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court froze a temporary injunction that had briefly forced several agencies to rehire 17,000 of the dismissed workers. Since then, many have moved on, finding new jobs while agencies reshaped their staffing under the administration’s directives.
Still, Alsup recognized the lingering damage. The workers, he said, were branded as poor performers under “pretextual” justifications, leaving a stain on their records. To address that, he ordered 19 agencies—including Defense, Veterans Affairs, Treasury, Agriculture, and Energy—to correct personnel files by mid-November and forbade them from following OPM’s blanket termination orders in the future.
The ruling was hailed by union leaders as an overdue acknowledgment of the injustice. Everett Kelley, head of the American Federation of Government Employees, said the decision exposes the government’s “sham” justifications and forces agencies to admit those workers were wrongfully cast aside.
The White House has not weighed in on the decision.
