Thousands of "fired" federal workers get their jobs back [Rachel Maddow 5/1/25]

Politics & Elections
1

I couldn’t sleep last night and was browsing YouTube around 3 AM when I came across this video. According to it, Rachel Maddow states that a district judge in California, Judge William Alsup, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, has declared that the OPM had no authority to fire the thousands of federal workers and orders all of them to be reinstated. Rachel spells out the judge’s order carefully and quotes extensively from it. This seems kind of important to me, but I haven’t seen anything about this in the news elsewhere. Watch for yourself.

It’s not posted from Rachel’s YouTube channel, and then there’s the wonky to and fro camera work, but it seems to be legit.

https://youtu.be/1ZDstu_OAFI?si=kVJ99eLmRHakeGJ2

There is a transcript, but it’s fun to hear Rachel’s outrage when she reads from the judge’s ruling.

Here’s the story on the NPR website:

Thousands of fired federal workers must be offered reinstatement, a judge rules

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/13/nx-s1-5325959/federal-employees-court-firing

There is a transcript.

2

That NPR story is from March 13. Is there something new to report?

3

You tell me. I don’t know. Her report is dated May 18. :woman_shrugging:

Have I been whooshed? Wouldn’t be the first time.

It is still great to hear her reading from the court documents.

4

This story is about a court ordering that they get their jobs back.

That is, unfortunately, a very different thing from them actually getting their jobs back.

5

Why do they get their jobs back? Aren’t they at-will like the rest of us that suffer from massive layoffs?

6

Some percentage of federal employees are under contract. Many are union members

7

Most federal employees are Civil Servants, and can only be fired for cause. Mind you, probationary employees can get laid off for a lot of stuff before they get fully in.

8

If you watch the video, Rachel reads extensively from the judge’s ruling (he is furious, BTW!), which explains why OPM did not have the authority to fire any of them.

9

Many are not at will employees, if you think about it for like 5 seconds you could see why that is. If civil servants were at will an unethical president and/or one who was beholden to a foreign nation, could shut down the federal government, ignoring the appropriations made by Congress as is their constitutional duty, to line his own posters and/or do the bidding of a foreign nation. I hope to god I never live to see a day when Americans are so uninformed and hateful to elect such a president.

10

Federal employees are not at will employees. Even federal probationary employees are afforded rights and protections, although they are limited compared to federal career employees.

Just because a court says something to the Trump regime does not make it so. The devil is in the details.

11

Yeah, that could happen. :roll_eyes:

12

From the article:

“You will not bring the people in here to be cross-examined. You’re afraid to do so because you know cross-examination would reveal the truth,” Alsup said, addressing OPM’s legal team. “I tend to doubt that you’re telling me the truth.”

The administration, of course, is appealing the ruling. So it will probably be a while before that’s heard.

13

I remember interviews with some fired federal employees. Some said that the stated reason for termination was poor performance though they had exemplary performance reviews and no prior complaints. My employer, for example, requires that a problem employee go through a performance improvement plan and that there is a documented history of failures before the problem employee can be terminated.

14

In the video Rachel quotes the judge’s angry ruling WRT firing people for so-called poor performance: OPM did it that way so these people wouldn’t be eligible for unemployment compensation.

Even though trump is appealing this, I think it’s an important story and bravo to the judge for some cast Iron balls.

15

To be honest, that page is horribly misleading because the video today says “Breaking News May 19, 2025” (yesterday it said May 18) so it’s just appearing to be breaking news with the current date listed. And no, that ruling is not the current situation because on April 8, SCOTUSBlog reported, “The Supreme Court on Tuesday [April 8] paused an order by a judge in San Francisco that would require the federal government to reinstate more than 16,000 workers who were fired by six agencies earlier this year. A group of nonprofits challenging the layoffs argued that the terminations by the Office of Personnel Management violated several different parts of the federal law governing administrative agencies. But by an apparent vote of 7-2, the justices nonetheless put the order by Senior U.S. District Judge William Alsup on hold while the challenge to the firings continues, explaining that the nonprofits do not have a legal right, known as standing, to challenge the terminations.”

16

And of course that video wasn’t posted by Rachel Maddow’s show itself or the network but by someone else, in the hope of getting views.

Here, instead is what appears to be the same video, posted by MSNBC and dated March 13, 2025.

17

ThelmaLou hangs her head in embarrassment.

Yeah, I got that, but it didn’t deter me. :frowning:

Thanks for straightening me out.

Note to self: don’t get all excited about YouTube videos you find at 3 AM when you can’t sleep.

18

But if you want to discuss how these firings are bullshit, I’m happy to go on (and on) about that.

For one thing, they were discussing this on a program on public radio the other day. One reporter mentioned interviewing federal employees who had taken the offer of voluntary termination in exchange for continuation of their salaries through the end of September. One mentioned seeing their same job posted, so that the government was looking to hire someone to do his job while paying him to stay home. How is that saving money? There’s also the fact that actually going through the process of posting a job, fielding applications, vetting the selected individual and getting them trained and set up for benefits is surprisingly expensive. I’m not sure of the total but it might be the equivalent of several months of salary.

For another, some who were fired were paid out of industry fees. Those within the FDA, for instance, who review and approve/disapprove new medical devices, are paid from industry fees. So claiming that firing these people is saving money is bullshit.

Others who were fired were people like inspectors, investigators and auditors, who can actually save the government money by identifying fraud and abuse.

And has been said, the government payroll is only a small fraction of total government spending, which is dominated by the DoD budget, Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid.

And as I mentioned in another thread, during the Clinton Administration, Al Gore led the National Partnership for Reinventing Government. Al Gore noted recently that it did so quietly, without lawsuits or firing people (instead they used retirements and voluntary separations).

During its five years, it catalyzed significant changes in the way the federal government operates, including the elimination of over 100 programs, the elimination of over 250,000 federal jobs, the consolidation of over 800 agencies, and the transfer of institutional knowledge to contractors. NPR introduced the use of performance measurements and customer satisfaction surveys, and encouraged the use of technology including the Internet. NPR is recognized as a success and had a lasting impact according to government officials who worked on or were influenced by it under the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.

If you want well-managed government with lower deficits, elect Democrats. If you want chaos, endless wars and massive government deficits, elect Republicans.

19

I agree that the subject is enormously important. It’s creating chaos for its own sake, which is how trump has always done business.

I wondered when it first happened why agency heads just didn’t say, “This is bullshit. No one can take this shotgun approach to firing! It’s against the law!”

And the bullshit about saying it’s for “performance issues” was/is blatantly a cover using a teeny loophole. Why did everyone just go along with it? Was trump going to order troops into the agencies and arrest people and ship them to El Salvador? Didn’t some agencies just tell their people to ignore those memos?

Something about this particular part of the trump-generated BS that’s happening really sticks in my craw.

20

Probably lower pay for the position.

Are industry fees sort of a general fund? So if they don’t go to pay an they pay for other things?

I’m curious about this as well. Who legally demanded the firings? I’m assuming Elon can’t since he has no real power until confirmed by the Senate so who signed off the needed paperwork?