March 14, 2025
By Ashley Murray – States Newsroom D.C. Bureau
WASHINGTON D.C. — A second federal judge ordered late Thursday that President Donald Trump’s administration reinstate probationary federal workers who were fired as part of the president’s and billionaire adviser Elon Musk’s government downsizing agenda.
District Judge James Bredar for the District of Maryland issued a temporary restraining order mandating nearly 20 federal departments and agencies to reinstate new or recent hires by Monday at 1 p.m. Eastern. The order from Bredar came hours after a similar one from a federal judge in California.
The lawsuit was filed March 6 by Democratic attorneys general in 19 states and the District of Columbia, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin.
Bredar’s order reinstates just more than 23,500 probationary positions across the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Labor, Transportation, Treasury and Veterans Affairs, as well as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, General Services Administration, Small Business Administration and U.S. Agency for International Development, according to figures in the original complaint.
A hearing is scheduled for March 26 in Baltimore. The temporary mandate expires the evening of March 27.
Bredar’s order did not include the nearly 5,500 employees fired from the Department of Defense and National Archives and Records Administration.
The emergency decision out of Maryland followed an earlier ruling Thursday from a California federal judge who extended a previous temporary order immediately reinstating probationary jobs at the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Science Foundation and Small Business Administration, as well as the departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense.
The Trump administration quickly appealed the decision out of the Northern District of California. That suit was brought by more than a dozen plaintiffs, including unions representing hundreds of thousands of federal workers.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt slammed the California decision, saying in a statement Thursday “a single judge is attempting to unconstitutionally seize the power of hiring and firing from the Executive Branch.”
Musk, a senior White House adviser, is the face of Trump’s rapid-fire workforce downsizing. The top donor to Trump’s reelection bid has posted numerous times on his social media platform, X, about the need to slash federal workers.
In February at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington, D.C., Musk waved around a chainsaw gifted to him from Argentine President Javier Milei and declared, “This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy.”
Add comment