A U.S. board that reviews the firings of federal employees on Wednesday ordered the U.S. Department of Agriculture to temporarily reinstate thousands of workers who lost their jobs as part of President Donald Trump's layoffs of the federal workforce.
Cathy Harris, a member of the Merit System Protection Board, ordered the USDA to reinstate fired probationary employees for 45 days while a challenge to the terminations plays out.
The decision was issued a day after a federal judge blocked Trump from firing Harris, a Democrat, and removing her from her position with the board without cause before her term expires in three years. The administration is appealing that decision.
"This is great news and needs to be done with all impacted agencies with similarly situated employees as fast as possible," said J. Ward Morrow, assistant general counsel at the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents some of the reinstated workers.
Tanya Torst, who was fired from the U.S. Forest Service, a USDA agency, on Feb. 15, said she would be thrilled to return to her former job fundraising for a group of six national forests, though she worried about talk of shutting federal offices nationwide and of further staff reductions later this month.
"We're thrilled to come back, but we're hoping they have a place for us."
The USDA and White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump and Elon Musk, the architect of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, are spearheading an unprecedented effort to shrink the federal bureaucracy, including through job cuts.
It's estimated that more than 20,000 federal employees, almost all probationary workers, have lost their jobs and another 75,000 have taken a buyout, out of the 2.3 million federal civilian workforce. Probationary workers typically have less than a year of service in their current roles although some are longtime federal workers.
Union efforts to contest the mass firings in federal court have faced procedural hurdles with judges questioning whether unions had standing to bring the cases or finding that they should have been brought to administrative boards like the MSPB.
The merit board has proved to be a potential roadblock in the Trump administration's efforts to purge the federal workforce. The board hears appeals by federal government employees when they are fired or disciplined.
It has already halted the firing of six other such employees at various agencies at the request of a watchdog agency whose leader Trump has also sought to fire, Hampton Dellinger of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.
Dellinger, an appointee of Trump's Democratic predecessor Joe Biden, on Tuesday said that he had asked the board to halt the firing of thousands of USDA employees.
Dellinger argued that the Trump administration's firing of the probationary employees was done unlawfully and without regard to the workers' rights while circumventing regulations governing mass reductions in the federal workforce.
Harris agreed, saying she found reasonable grounds to believe that the agency fired them in violation of federal law. The board ordered all probationary USDA employees terminated since Feb. 13 to be temporarily reinstated.
Dellinger in a statement welcomed the decision. He said his agency would continue investigating the firing of other federal probationary employees, and he called on federal agencies that had recently fired such workers to immediately reinstate them.
"Voluntarily rescinding these hasty and apparently unlawful personnel actions is the right thing to do and avoids the unnecessary wasting of taxpayer dollars," he said.
Like with Harris, Trump has sought to remove Dellinger from office, only to be stymied by the courts. The administration is appealing a decision from Saturday by a federal judge holding that Trump's firing of Dellinger was unlawful.
