Not So Fast, Big Balls! Two Judges Order Government To Re-Hire Fired Employees
Is the government efficient yet?
Two federal judges on opposite coasts have ordered the government to reinstate at least 24,000 employees that DOGE or whoever fired, because mass-firings of government employees is not legal, and there are a whole bunch of rules about it. Government reductions in force can happen, but there are processes for it and bargaining agreements in place, and Big Balls just can’t come in and take everybody’s keys one day.
And exactly who originated the order for the firings has been a DOGE hide-and-seek fuckeroo! Elon Musk has no authority to order anything, as he has no official job besides being the president’s temporary special best friend, even while he brags literally night and day on his hellsite about all the jobs and departments he is throwing into the woodchipper. For court purposes, the role of fall guy and axeman is being played by the (acting) head of the Office of Personnel Management, one Charles Ezell. Can you even believe he is yet another low-level loyalist plucked from obscurity to be suddenly surprise-in-charge? Ezell’s a born-again guitar-strumming Counting Crows fan from Georgia, and he told byFaith magazine that he is thrilled that Trump and God chose him for this post. (“I feel like Joseph must have felt when he found himself to be second in command in Egypt. How did I end up here?”)
Anyway, in federal court in San Francisco, government employees unions for workers at agencies including the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Department of Veterans Affairs had asked a judge to order the Office of Personnel Management and Charles Ezell in his capacity, such as it is, as (acting) head of OPM to reverse the mass-firing of probationary employees he tried to pull off via email on February 13, based on the very transparently bullshit claim that thousands of employees were being fired for poor performance.
Of course OPM was clearly lying about the “poor performance” thing; nobody even pretended to have looked at anybody’s performance reviews, and going after all probationary employees is rather the opposite of judging their individual performance, duh. And also as the unions’ lawyers pointed out, OPM never had any kind of authority to order any firings or conduct layoffs in the first place, from any agency other than their own:
Congress, not OPM, controls and authorizes federal employment and related spending by the federal administrative agencies, and Congress has determined that each agency is responsible for managing its own employees. OPM lacks the constitutional, statutory, or regulatory authority to order federal agencies to terminate employees in this fashion.
And while agencies can conduct reductions in force if they want to, federal employees would still be protected by collective bargaining agreements that prohibit a mass-email no-notice situation.
When District Judge William Alsup was like, who did this?! Charles Ezell, I order you to get your ass into my courtroom and explain! the government fought that tooth and nail, and even offered up another employee as tribute instead.
Then, on March 4, Ezell hastily issued another memo, “clarifying” that “agencies have ultimate decision-making authority over, and responsibility for, such personnel actions,” not him, and he backtracked that maybe the agencies should reconsider their hasty decision and “promptly determine whether those employees [who were already gone] should be retained at the agency.” Efficient!
Ezell ended up submitting a written declaration to the judge instead of testifying, and it was all like, it wasn’t me, there was no mass termination program, I was just issuing guidance to the agencies! The agencies were supposed to conduct performance reviews first, can I help it if they all misunderstood my advice?
Pretty pathetic attempt at ass-coverage! Too bad lawyers for the employees had the receipts: emails from agencies saying that they were conducting firings because of instruction from OPM, records showing that many fired employees had excellent performance reviews, and a memo from Ezell opining that agencies could just ignore the rules because firing probationary employees was a loophole that won’t trigger “appeal rights to the Merit Systems Protection Board.”
Clearly out of patience with Ezell and the government’s lies and tomfoolery, yesterday Judge Alsup called the layoffs a “gimmick” and “sham” that the Office of Personnel Management had no legal authority to carry out, and ordered the departments of Veterans Affairs, Defense, Energy, Interior, Agriculture, and Treasury to reinstate the employees. And he called the government LIARS for good measure:
“It is a sad, sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that's a lie. That should not have been done in our country. It was a sham in order to avoid statutory requirements.”
Ezell may yet get himself held in contempt for refusing to show up and answer any questions, and his lying has already made the baby Jesus cry.
And then also yesterday, in Maryland, Judge James Bredar issued a ruling in a suit from 19 states and the District of Columbia against 41 officials at 18 federal agencies, covering about 24,000 employees. States are supposed to be notified of reductions in force so they can prepare to assist laid-off employees, and employees and their union are supposed to get at least 60 days’ notice, and of course nobody got anything. So Bredar has issued a 14-day restraining order that returns all of those employees back to where they were before the government acted.
Elon seems pretty pissed about those double-L’s, retweeting this yesterday (and then apparently deleting it).
What the fuck even! Sure, Jan, the government employees who keep planes from falling out of the sky, worms out of your cold cuts, and oh yeah, made sure YOUR companies got their checks for $38 BILLION in government subsidies over the years, they’re the REAL NAZIs. At least he is admitting the Holocaust is real?
Then Musk blather-reposted a bunch of screeds about impeach activist judges who hand out orders like M&Ms, they are radical communist loons, democratic operatives, fume fume fume. If the orders make him that mad, then they must be good!
What happens next, we shall see. Reinstating thousands of employees may not be that simple, they have already turned in their keys and electronics, been locked out of computer systems and had their software licenses yanked. Assuming the Trump administration does not simply ignore the order and dragass until the Supreme Court steps in to either let them break the law or force them to follow it.
Whatever happens, the administration has already traumatized thousands of employees with all the uncertainty, so they’ve got that going for them.
Yeah, poor, poor Hitler, a victim of those horrible public sector administrators and their intractable policies that he was powerless to stop. Whew.
When a guy is defending a genocidal maniac as the victim, you just know he's got plans to do the same. It's terrifying.
He should fire the two stranded astronauts, solving the stranded astronauts problem.