On Tuesday, a federal judge felt bad for the thousands of government workers who were fired by the Trump administration earlier this year. But he also wasn’t sure if putting them back to work was the right thing to do and asked what the courts could do in the end.
Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson said those things at a hearing in Richmond, Virginia, at the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The hearing was part of a case that was brought by 19 states and the District of Columbia. The suit says that the mass firing of probationary workers hurt the states because they did not get the legal advice they needed to get ready for the shortage of workers.
“Some part of me thinks that the voters might be the ones who decide this for sure,” Wilkinson said. People say that the courts can only do so much, but firing so many workers comes with huge political costs, so in a way, the voters may have to decide the final verdict. That might not be the whole answer, but it could be a part of it.
In March, a federal judge in Baltimore told the federal government to bring the workers back to work, but the federal appeals court stopped it. The states want more review while the lawsuit goes on, but at Tuesday’s hearing, Wilkinson said that bringing back all of the workers seemed like an overly broad solution.
The lawyer general of the District of Columbia, Caroline Van Zile, said that the District of Columbia and states have been hurt because they didn’t get the 60 days’ notice and information about cuts that the law says they should have gotten when the federal government did a reduction in force. She said that Congress set the time and the details to help the states talk back.
“They left it up to the states, not the federal government, to deal with unemployment crises like this,” Van Zile said. For that reason, the law leaves us carrying the bags, which is why they gave us this right to know.
But an attorney for the appellants, Sarah Welch, said that information had been given. She also said that the probationary workers in question were not fired because of something called a “reduction in force,” which is what the states say they did not get the 60-day warning and information period.
“These agencies did not carry out (force reductions).” They haven’t cut jobs, and there’s not a shred of proof that through firing temporary workers that are being questioned in this case, agencies have cut jobs or changed their functions, which are the main signs of a RIF, Welch said.
All over the federal government, people on probation have been laid off because they are generally new to the job and don’t have full civil service protection.
Wilkinson felt sorry for the workers but said, “there seems to be a disconnect between the harm alleged and the remedy imposed.”
The judge said, “The remedy has to be tailored to the violation. Here, the remedy is very broad, much broader than the actual violation, and as a basic matter of equity, that’s a hard proposition.”
But Van Zile said she thought U.S. District Judge James Bredar was right when he said that agencies can’t do a lot of illegal things “and then complain that the remedy is too burdensome.”
Van Zile said, “They are the ones who fired 24,000 people all at once.” “That hurt the states.” We had no choice and no way to stay away from that hurt.
Bredar was one of two judges chosen by Democratic presidents who said that the Trump administration broke federal law when it fired people from 20 departments in the states that sued.
Another order from U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco was thrown out by the Supreme Court because nonprofits did not have the legal right to fight over the firing of probationary workers.
During the hearing on Tuesday, Wilkinson also asked if bringing the workers back would give the states too much power over the government workforce. Even though the judge felt bad for the people who were affected, “there’s a real question here of what the federal remedy could be that wouldn’t really significantly damage the federal government’s control over the composition of its own workforce,” he said.
Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin are the states and Washington, D.C. that are suing the Trump administration in the Baltimore case.