A group of federal worker unions filed a lawsuit late Wednesday against the Trump administration’s efforts to fire government employees who are still in a probationary period.
“OPM is an agency with no statutory authority to make termination decisions for federal employees (other than for OPM’s own employees). 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,” the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit was filed by unions affiliated with the AFL-CIO, the American Federation of Government Employees, and others against the OPM and its acting director, Charles Ezell, over a directive to fire probationary workers in a bid to shrink the size of the federal government.
Their lawsuit alleged further that the OPM directive on probationary workers violated employment law because those workers have to be fired for poor performance.
“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,” it said.
The decision on probationary workers, who generally have less than a year on the job, came earlier this month from the OPM, which serves as a human resources department for the federal government.
It’s not clear how many workers are currently in a probationary period. According to government data maintained by OPM, as of March 2024, 217,000 workers had less than a year on the job, which is the most recent data available.
Elon Musk, whom Trump has given wide leeway to help slash government spending with his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), said earlier this month that the elimination of whole agencies is necessary.
“I think we do need to delete entire agencies as opposed to leave a lot of them behind,” Musk said via a video call to the World Governments Summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. “If we don’t remove the roots of the weed, then it’s easy for the weed to grow back.”
As of Feb. 17, the Trump administration fired thousands of workers across multiple federal agencies after the deadline for employees to accept a buyout passed.
Some 1,165 employees at the National Institutes of Health were terminated, an internal email said. Meanwhile, several hundred workers on probationary status have been fired by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), said the union of Professional Aviation Safety Specialists.
