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Federal Judge has just ruled that the mass firings are likely illegal and has put them on hold! [1]
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Date: 2025-02-27
Hallelujah. Some sanity perhaps?
Federal Judge William Alsup has declared that the OPM has no right to fire people at other agencies. He says they can fire their own workers, period, but not DOD, Park Service, etc.
In this ruling, Alsup says,
“Congress has given the authority to hire and fire to the agencies themselves. The Department of Defense, for example, has statutory authority to hire and fire,” Alsup said from the bench as he handed down the ruling Thursday evening in San Francisco federal court. “The Office of Personnel Management does not have any authority whatsoever under any statute in the history of the universe to hire and fire employees at another agency. They can hire and fire their own employees.”
This suit was brought by a union and advocacy groups representing Federal workers, and it was led by the American Federation of Government Employees which represents about 800,000 government workers.
It declared in part,
“OPM, the federal agency charged with implementing this nation’s employment laws, in one fell swoop has perpetrated one of the most massive employment frauds in the history of this country, telling tens of thousands of workers that they are being fired for performance reasons, when they most certainly were not,” attorneys for the unions said in a court filing.
The irony of the language used here is no accident. Musk and DOGE have declared war on the Federal government and on the people of the US declaring that we are “fraud” and “waste.”
It is abominable and I am deeply grateful to see this ruling.
The suit specifically referenced the 200,000 probationary workers who were summarily fired, representing approximately 10% of the government workforce, in an unprecedented and unAmerican hatchet job at the bloody hands of unqualified people who had no right to do so in the first place.
The Justice Department hemmed and hawed and said the unions should go to the Labor Board, but they crippled that, and of course basically are claiming that Kings Musk and Trump, the First and Hopefully Last of Their Names, have the right to do whatever.
Anyway, Alsup declared,
“How could so much of the workforce be amputated, suddenly, overnight? It’s so irregular and so widespread and so aberrant in the history of our country. How could this all happen with each agency deciding on its own to do something so aberrational?” said Alsup, who was appointed to the bench by President Bill Clinton in 1999. “I don’t believe it.”
To make matters worse, many of the probationary employees had excellent records and were not in trouble or lacking in any way and their loss will surely harm the country.
I hope they are all rehired ASAP.
With apologies for quoting WAPO.
www.washingtonpost.com/…
Note: probably DOJ will appeal to the Supreme Kangaroo Court. We will see. But the fact is they’re getting pushback even from spineless Republican Senators.
So this is a good sign.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/27/2306716/-Federal-Judge-has-just-ruled-that-the-mass-firings-are-likely-illegal-and-has-put-them-on-hold?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web
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