March 13, 2025 12:23 PM UTC

DOGE D'oh! Judge Orders Fired Federal Employees to be Immediately Rehired

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• by: Colorado Pols

The Trump administration and Prime Minister Elon Musk have fired roughly 103,452 federal workers thus far in 2025. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 21,000 of those fired employees were let go while on “probationary” status.

President Trump on Wednesday claimed to be very sad about the American families whose lives have been upended by the whims of lunatic billionaires, though at the same time he’s arguing that they didn’t really exist in the first place.”Sure I do. I feel very badly,” said Trump in response to a question from NBC News. “But many of them don’t work at all. Many of them never showed up to work.”

Not everybody buys this excuse, however. As POLITICO reports:

A federal judge on Thursday ordered federal agencies to rehire tens of thousands of probationary employees who were fired amid President Donald Trump’s turbulent effort to drastically shrink the federal bureaucracy.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup described the mass firings as a “sham” strategy by the government’s central human resources office to sidestep legal requirements for reducing the federal workforce. 

Alsup, a San Francisco-based appointee of President Bill Clinton, ordered the Defense, Treasury, Energy, Interior, Agriculture and Veterans Affairs departments to “immediately” offer all fired probationary employees their jobs back. The Office of Personnel Management, the judge said, had made an “unlawful” decision to terminate them. [Pols emphasis]

The order is one of the most far-reaching rejections of the Trump administration’s effort to slash the bureaucracy and is almost certain to be appealed.

Alsup also lashed out at the Justice Department over its handling of the case, saying he believes that Trump administration lawyers were hiding the facts about who directed the mass firings.

“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,” the judge said to a DOJ attorney during a hearing Thursday. “I tend to doubt that you’re telling me the truth. … I’m tired of seeing you stonewall on trying to get at the truth.”

This is welcome news to at least some of the axed employees who were likely among the 40,000 federal employees who live in Colorado (it has been difficult to find exact numbers about the firings); unfortunately, “immediately” is probably not going to be what it sounds like since the Trump administration is likely to appeal the judge’s ruling.

There’s also a growing political question in this regard for Trump, whose approval ratings are falling faster than Tesla’s stock. As Aaron Blake notes for The Washington Post:

A new CNN poll released Wednesday is the latest survey to suggest that Trump’s chaotic presidency — most notably his government cuts and his unpredictable tariffs gambit — has squandered whatever goodwill and mandate he walked into office with. [Pols emphasis]

The top line is that Trump’s approval on the economy is worse than it’s ever been. Americans disapprove of his handling of it by 56 percent to 44 percent. CNN’s polling through Trump’s two terms had never before found a majority disapproving of Trump on the economy.

The network’s new survey is the second poll this month, along with one from Reuters-Ipsos, to show Trump hitting a new low on the economy, which was his most consistently positive major issue during his first term.

Most Americans have a negative view of Elon Musk as well, and another new survey from the University of Maryland shows that people are not pleased with the Trump administration’s power grab:

As controversies arise about the authority of Presidents over different facets of the federal government – including spending, independent agencies, and the federal workforce – a new national survey by the Program for Public Consultation (PPC) finds majorities of Americans in opposition to increasing Presidential authority. Large majorities favor Congress continuing to have final authority over federal spending, and whether agencies are independent or not. A majority oppose creating a new class of federal policy-related workers that are easier to replace by Presidents.

In other words, Americans are understanding what Trump is doing…and they don’t like it. For a President who is obsessed with his own popularity, something’s gotta give.