The lawsuit was filed against an order from the Human Resources Administration.
A group of federal unionists filed a lawsuit late Wednesday over the Trump administration’s efforts to fire government officials who are still on probationary period.
“OPM is an agency that does not have the statutory authority to make termination decisions to federal employees (other than OPM’s own employees). Despite this lack of legal authority, OPM is the national federal organization that includes this district. We have ordered agencies to wipe out the ranks of probation employees without considering applicable laws,” the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit was filed by the AFL-CIO, the Federation of US Government Employees and other unions affiliated with the. government.
Their lawsuit further alleged that the OPM directive on probationary workers violated the Employment Act as these workers must be fired for poor performance.
“OPM, the federal agency responsible for implementing the employment laws of this country, has committed one of the largest employment frauds in the country’s history at one time, with tens of thousands of people on performance reasons. I told the workers they were fired, and they definitely wasn’t,” it said.
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Decisions regarding probation workers generally for less than a year at work came earlier this month from OPM, which serves as the federal government’s human resources department.
It is not clear how many workers are currently on probation. According to government data maintained by OPM, as of March 2024, 217,000 workers had less than a year of work, which is the most recent data available.
Elon Musk, who has given Trump a wide leeway to help reduce government spending with government efficiency (DOGE), said earlier this month that an organizational elimination is necessary.
“I think we need to remove the entire agency rather than leaving many agents behind,” Musk said in a video call to the World Government Summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. “If we don’t remove the weed roots, the weeds will come back and it’s easy.”
As of February 17, the Trump administration had fired thousands of workers at multiple federal agencies after a deadline when employees accepted the passage.
1,165 employees at the National Institutes of Health have been terminated, an internal email said. Meanwhile, the Coalition of Professional Aviation Safety Experts said hundreds of workers in probation status have been fired by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
