Free Republic

The Government now asks us to stay the district court’s preliminary injunction. Among other things, the Government argues that the States lack Article III standing to challenge the terminations and that the district court lacked subject-matter jurisdiction because the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, Pub. L. No. 95-454, provides the exclusive means for review of personnel actions taken against federal employees.... The Government is likely to succeed in showing the district court lacked jurisdiction over Plaintiffs’ claims, and the Government is unlikely to recover the funds disbursed to reinstated probationary employees.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday halted a federal judge's ruling requiring several federal agencies to reinstate around 16,000 workers the Trump administration had sought to fire. The decision to grant the administration's request means the federal government doesn't have to take steps to bring back some workers who were laid off while litigation moves forward before a federal judge in California.

A federal judge on Thursday ordered federal agencies to reinstate tens of thousands of probationary employees who were fired amid President Donald Trump’s turbulent effort to drastically shrink the federal bureaucracy. U.S. District Judge William Alsup described the mass firings as a “sham” strategy by the government’s central human resources office to sidestep legal requirements for reducing the federal workforce. Alsup, a San Francisco-based appointee of President Bill Clinton, ordered the Departments of Defense, Treasury, Energy, Agriculture and Veterans Affairs to “immediately” offer all fired probationary employees their jobs back. The Office of Personnel Management, the judge said, had made...

Derek Copeland was 11 days away from hitting his one-year mark with the U.S. Department of Agriculture when he received his termination letter on Feb. 14. "You have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest," the notice said. Copeland was shocked. His performance appraisal stated that he was "fully successful" in performing the critical functions of his job as a training specialist at the National Detector Dog Training Center in Newnan, Ga. Moreover, while he'd been at the USDA less than a year, he'd spent his career working with dogs. Copeland had...