The Trump administration is once again free to fire probation employees. For now.
The U.S. Fourth Circuit blocked the decision of a lower Maryland court that sided with the government on Wednesday in a 2-1 decision, leading to the reinstatement of thousands of federal workers fired in February.
The employee purge marked one of the first stages of President Trump's plan to rapidly shrink civil servants and overhaul or eliminate the entire office and program. Since then, workers' status has been tied up in a legal battle over whether dismissals were legally carried out.
The Court of Appeals' ruling came on Wednesday the day after the Supreme Court blocked a similar decision in California, which governs the government in another case. There are currently no court orders to prevent the government from firing probation employees.
Both courts ruled on the issue of narrow status. Whether the trial dismissal is extremely harmful to the plaintiff and has the right to sue in the district court.
In California, nonprofits sued the government over firing at six agencies because they said they had benefited from services provided by federal workers. In Maryland, 19 states and the District of Columbia sued 20 federal agencies, claiming that the government is obliged to give them a notice if the government can suddenly and significantly increase the demand for unemployment benefits.
Almost everyone who recently revived as a result of a district court order was not immediately known what the latest decision would mean for thousands of fired probation employees. The exchange puts the employee in Limbo's condition and wonders if he will be fired again after being rehired.
Trump's inauguration, the government's HR department, has directed to compile a list of all probation employees. Workers were considered easy to fire because of the lack of public service protection for long-term employees.
Public Services Partnership, a nonprofit that promotes government best practices, estimated that the government employed more than 250,000 people earlier this year. The Trump administration has not disclosed the exact number of trial workers fired, but court applications show that the figure is more than 20,000.
Cases challenging the firing of probation employees have been curbed through courts, but the Trump administration is taking other stages of mass layoffs. Shortly after they were revived last month, I heard that some of the probation employees would be let go again as part of another layoff.
Trump has directed the government to significantly reduce its federal workforce of over 2 million people.
The court's decisions on Tuesday and Wednesday did not address whether the federal government complied with the law when it fired a large number of probation workers. Questions regarding the legality of dismissal may be unanswered if the court determines that the plaintiff cannot pose a challenge.
Nick Bedner, an administrative law expert at the University of Minnesota, said: “The problem is determining how these employees find relief.”
In multiple cases of disputing the Trump administration's personnel actions, the federal government argued that Congress has established a separate system to handle employment disputes. But the system isn't designed to handle the number of mass shootings made by the Trump administration, experts say.
Trump fired Kathy Harris, the head of that committee. Harris has since returned and has been fired multiple times again.
The latest twist on Wednesday allowed the Supreme Court, along with the Trump administration, to allow the government to take her away and remove her along with Gwyn Wilcox, who heads another independent panel protecting federal workers' rights.
According to an interim order issued by Chief Secretary John G. Roberts Jr., Harris and Wilcox will remain fired while the Supreme Court reviews the case.
