DOGE Fired Thousands of Government Employees Over the Weekend

The Washington Post is reporting that DOGE fired thousands of government employees over the weekend, many of whom were on probationary status often reserved for new hires. 

Many federal government employees were dismissed over the holiday weekend as managers confronted a Trump administration demand to fire workers by Tuesday. In group texts and in online forums, they dubbed the error-ridden run of firings the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.”

The firings targeted new hires on probation, who have fewer protections than permanent employees, and swept up people with years of service who had recently transferred between agencies, as well as military veterans and people with disabilities employed through a program that sped their hiring but put them on two years’ probation. Most probationary employees have limited rights to appeal dismissals, but union heads have vowed to challenge the mass firings in court. The largest union representing federal workers has also indicated it plans to fight the terminations and pursue legal action…

The Trump administration will not disclose how many workers it cut since last week ahead of its Tuesday deadline, but the government employed more than 200,000 probationary workers as of last year. The firings have extended to touch employees at almost every agency, including map makers, archaeologists and cancer researchers, The Post found, in choices that some workers said contradicted a U.S. Office of Personnel Management directive to retain “mission-critical” workers.

The Post spoke to over 250 employees who claimed they had been fired with many of the decisions citing poor performance. However, some of these employees had only recently received positive reviews from their employers. A lawyer who spoke to the Post (and who filed a complaint about the process along with a left-leaning group) claimed this was illegal.

Firing employees en masse with the same claim of poor performance is illegal, said Jim Eisenmann, a partner at the Alden Law Group, a law firm specializing in litigation by federal employees. It violates federal law covering career civil service employees, he said.

“It can’t be true,” Eisenmann said. “They’re clearly not articulating this on an individual basis, which is what makes it so suspect.”

But an OPM spokesperson responded that probationary hires had no guarantee of continued employment. “The probationary period is a continuation of the job application process, not an entitlement for permanent employment,” she said.

Frankly, this reminds me a bit of President Obama’s attempt to frame DACA as an extension of prosecutorial discretion. Normally prosecutorial discretion is applied to individual cases but DACA expanded that to a large group nearly a million people. Similarly, I wonder if the firings carried out over the weekend don’t represent a similar approach to employment in which discretion usually applied to individuals (whether to retain or fire them) is being applied to a larger group all at once.

OPM also offered a template notice agencies could send to fired workers. It read in part: “The Agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest.” Federal law gives agencies wide latitude to fire probationary workers so long as they provide written notice “as to why he is being separated [and] the agency’s conclusions as to the inadequacies of his performance or conduct.”

You can rest assured that this is going to wind up in court. The government will argue that probationary employees can be fired at any time so long as they are given written notice and lawyers for the employees will argue that the decisions weren’t made on an individual basis. Lawsuits over DACA have dragged on for years. The Alden Law Group and Democracy Forward have already filed a complaint over the firings. 

These firings could play into the decision expected tomorrow in a case brought by a group of 14 states. The state AG’s asked for temporary restraining order while the case proceeds but in a hearing today the judge didn’t sound inclined to grant one. However, one of the issues that couldn’t be resolved during the hearing was whether or not thousands of employees had been fired over the weekend.

A government attorney told Chutkan he had not been able to confirm mass government layoffs took place on Friday.

“The firing of thousands of federal employees is not a small or common thing. You haven’t been able to confirm that?” she asked. The DOJ attorney said he would update the court with a letter by the end of Monday.

So if the government does confirm there were thousands of firings over the weekend, as the Post story indicates, that could potentially change the judge’s view of the situation and result in a TRO issued sometime tomorrow preventing DOGE from firing anyone else until the case is reloved. Stay tuned