Washington — A federal appeals court on Monday rejected a lawsuit filed by a group of states that challenged the mass firings of thousands of federal probationary workers.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit divided 2-1 in finding that the 19 states and the District of Columbia did not have legal standing to sue over the large-scale terminations. The appeals court sent the case back to the federal district court with directions to dismiss it.
“We acknowledge that the abrupt and indiscriminate dismissal of the probationary employees here exacted all-too-human costs upon those affected,” Judge Harvie Wilkinson wrote for the two-judge majority. “But this real impact on the employees, who are not parties here, cannot govern our review.”
Wilkinson wrote that while federal probationary workers “suffered the brunt of the harm” as a result of their firings, “they are nowhere to be found in this case.”
Joining Wilkinson in the majority was Judge Allison Jones Rushing. Judge DeAndrea Gist Benjamin dissented.
Probationary workers are those who generally have been in their jobs with the federal government for one or two years, depending on the nature of their jobs. Shortly after President Trump returned to the White House for a second term, his administration moved to lay off thousands of probationary workers as part of its goal of shrinking the size of the federal government.
The terminations occurred in mid-February, when thousands of probationary workers began receiving notices from their agencies that they were laid off. Court filings indicate that at least 24,000 of these federal employees had been fired by early March.
The 19 states and the District of Columbia swiftly filed a lawsuit against a slew of agencies challenging the mass firings, arguing that the terminations were unlawful because the Trump administration did not comply with a legal requirement to provide states with 60 days notice before a large-scale layoff.
The states that sued were Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin.
In April, a federal district court in Maryland ordered the Trump administration to reinstate all affected probationary workers living or working in the states that sued. The district court also prohibited the government from conducting any future reductions-in-force unless they were in compliance with federal law.
The 4th Circuit granted a Trump administration request to freeze the district court’s decision, clearing the way for agencies to lay off probationary workers again. It heard arguments in the case in May.
In his opinion, Wilkinson said that the interests at issue in the case are federal, so the states have no concrete injury that can be remedied by the courts.
“The federal government is required in all kinds of ways to respect the basic sovereignty of the states. But the reverse is also true,” he wrote. “It is hard to imagine a more traditionally federal function than the management of the federal workforce. The federal workforce performs federal functions. How it performs them is a matter of federal concern.”
He warned that if the court were to accept the states’ theory of how they have been harmed, every change in federal funding levels would authorize states to sue the federal government.
“A contrary result would upend our federalist system by ceding federal sovereignty to the states,” Wilkinson wrote.
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