Judge Orders Trump Admin to Issue Correction Notices to Fired Probationary Workers

The Supreme Court earlier this month blocked a previous order issued by the same judge that reinstated laid-off employees.

Protesters at a rally held by the American Federation of Government Employees of District 14 at the Office of Personnel Management in Washington, on March 4, 2025. Alex Wroblewski/AFP via Getty Images

A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to provide laid-off federal probationary employees with a written notice stating that they were not terminated for performance reasons but that it was part of a government-wide termination effort.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup also ordered Acting Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Charles Ezell not to tell agencies to terminate “any federal employee or group of federal employees.”

The judge wrote on April 18 that the firings of probationary workers followed an OPM template that states they were fired for job performance reasons.

“Termination under the false pretense of performance is an injury that will persist for the working life of each civil servant,” wrote Alsup, who is based in San Francisco. “The stain created by OPM’s pretense will follow each employee through their careers and will limit their professional opportunities.”

The latest directive from the judge is part of a lawsuit that was filed by labor unions and nonprofits contesting the mass firings of thousands of probationary workers in February under President Donald Trump.

Probationary workers are typically new hires or employees who were recently promoted and who must serve a trial period of one to two years before they receive full-term, or permanent, employment.

“If a particular termination was in fact carried out after an individualized evaluation of that employee’s performance or fitness, the Chief Human Capital Officer (or equivalent) of that agency may instead submit ... a declaration, under oath and seal, stating so and providing the individual reasoning underpinning that termination,” Alsup also wrote, setting a May 8 deadline to do so.

On April 8, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked an earlier order from Alsup that required the administration to return to work some of the terminated probationary federal employees who were terminated. The justices were responding to the Trump administration’s emergency appeal of Alsup’s ruling

The court’s order involved a technical legal assessment of the right, or standing, of several nonprofit associations to sue over the firings. Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, who dissented, said they would have kept the judge’s order in place.

The groups who filed the lawsuit argued that the Trump administration violated the Constitution’s separation of powers clause and that OPM had lacked “the constitutional, statutory, or regulatory authority to order federal agencies to terminate employees in this fashion that Congress has authorized those agencies to hire and manage.”

“Notwithstanding this lack of legal authority, OPM ordered federal agencies throughout the nation, including in this District, to wipe out their ranks of probationary employees without any regard to applicable statutes,” said their complaint, filed in February.

The Trump administration lawyers, in their emergency petition to the Supreme Court, said that the district judge had acted unconstitutionally.

The judge’s “extraordinary reinstatement order violates the separation of powers, arrogating to a single district court the Executive Branch’s powers of personnel management on the flimsiest of grounds and the hastiest of timelines,“ lawyers for the government wrote. ”That is no way to run a government.”

Separately, a federal judge in Maryland overseeing a similar lawsuit brought by 19 states ruled that the Trump administration did not follow laws regarding mass terminations of federal employees.

That order was overturned this past week by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a 2-1 decision.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.