Fired Federal Staff Weigh Returning to Work as More Cuts Loom

Tens of thousands of federal employees fired by 19 government agencies will now have to decide whether to return to their jobs after federal judges and an independent panel ordered the Trump administration to reinstate them.

Rulings from federal courts in California and Maryland this week cover the government’s newest employees, known as probationary workers, fired under President Donald Trump’s push to trim the federal workforce. The administration terminated more than 34,000 of them since Jan. 20, according to Bloomberg Law’s analysis.

“I hope the effort to have those unlawful firings reversed immediately will continue in every appropriate way,” said Hampton Dellinger, the former head of the Office of Special Counsel who was fired by Trump. The harm from the terminations are already “widespread,” said Dellinger, who led the whistleblower agency responsible for protecting federal staff.

But Trump’s legal losses aren’t completely blocking his plan to overhaul the federal workforce and how the executive branch operates. Some workers aren’t returning to their federal jobs to avoid the whiplash of competing court rulings or future rounds of firings and layoffs.

The Trump administration is expected to appeal orders reinstating federal employees, creating even more confusion for fired workers.

“We know what’s certain,” said Ben Andrews, a former safety manager at the Department of Veterans Affairs who told Bloomberg Law he will start a new job in April. “And what’s certain is they still want to do the cuts.”

Former Head Start program specialist Dayana Garcia said as of Friday morning she hadn’t heard from the Department of Health and Human Services about returning to her job. HHS was one of the agencies ordered to reinstate workers. It fired Garcia in mid-February, and she immediately started looking for a new role.

“I don’t have the luxury of waiting” to see if the department will reinstate her, she said.

Dellinger was pushing a federal appeals board to reinstate terminated probationary workers when he left his role. The Merit Systems Protection Board on March 5 directed the Agriculture Department to temporarily rehire more than 5,000 fired workers.

Dellinger was fired Feb. 7 then reinstated by a federal judge. A federal appellate court allowed him to be removed from his role while the case proceeded, prompting him to drop his case.

The court and administrative battles could prove revealing about Trump’s firings: the Maryland judge ordered the administration to produce a list of reinstated employees by Monday. The White House has not publicly released estimates of the number of federal workers fired across the government or how many have returned to work.

“Singular district court judges cannot abuse the power of the entire judiciary to thwart the president’s agenda,” said Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt in response to the two judges’ rulings. “If a federal district court judge would like executive powers, they can try and run for president themselves.”