A California federal judge on Thursday ordered the Office of Personnel Management to temporarily rescind directives prompting the mass firings of probationary employees at dozens of federal agencies, a major blow to the Trump administration’s efforts to drastically slash the size of the government.
“Congress has given the authority to hire and fire to the agencies themselves. The Department of Defense, for example, has statutory authority to hire and fire,” U.S. District Judge William Alsup reportedly said from the bench Thursday afternoon in San Francisco. “The Office of Personnel Management does not have any authority whatsoever under any statute in the history of the universe to hire and fire employees at another agency. They can hire and fire their own employees.”
