Democratic U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland speaks at a rally in support of federal workers outside the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2025. (Photo y Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court on Monday denied the Trump administration’s emergency effort to block the reinstatement of federal employees at six government agencies.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit rejected the government’s request to stay a Northern California district court’s March 13 ruling ordering the departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior, Treasury and Veterans Affairs to reinstate thousands of probationary positions.

The newly hired or promoted employees were fired as part of an agenda to slash federal jobs carried out by President Donald Trump and billionaire White House adviser Elon Musk.

“Given that the district court found that the employees were wrongfully terminated and ordered an immediate return to the status quo ante, an administrative stay of the district court’s order would not preserve the status quo. It would do just the opposite — it would disrupt the status quo and turn it on its head,” according to the 9th Circuit order.

Judge Barry G. Silverman, a late 1990s President Bill Clinton appointee, and Judge Ana de Alba, appointed by President Joe Biden in 2023, issued the order, while Judge Bridget S. Bade, a 2019 Trump appointee, delivered a partial dissent.

The government’s response to the emergency motion is due by Tuesday. Further briefs are due throughout April and May. An appeals hearing has not yet been scheduled.

District judge ruling on firings

The Trump administration appealed the lower court’s decision just hours after Judge William Alsup’s extension of his emergency order directing the agencies to reinstate the positions.

Alsup also set Thursday as a deadline for a list of all terminated employees and an explanation of what federal agencies have done to comply with his order.

The White House decried the decision, saying ​”a single judge is attempting to unconstitutionally seize the power of hiring and firing from the Executive Branch,” according to a statement Thursday from press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

Unions representing masses of federal employees sued Trump’s Office of Personnel Management and its acting director Charles Ezell in February over the agency’s unilateral directive across the agencies to fire tens of thousands of workers.

The affected agencies within the six departments included the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Institutes of Health and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, among several others.

On the same day as the decision out of California, a federal judge in Maryland issued a temporary restraining order mandating 20 federal agencies reinstate fired employees by Monday.

Chainsaw at CPAC

Musk, a senior White House adviser and top donor to Trump’s reelection, is the face of Trump’s workforce downsizing and has not shied away from sharing his plans on his social media platform, X.

He even wielded a chainsaw on stage in February at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington, D.C., and yelled to the audience “This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy.” The chainsaw was gifted to him by Argentina’s strongman President Javier Milei.

The White House has claimed in a court filing in a separate case that Musk has no decision-making power.

Demonstrators outside the U.S. Senate buildings on Capitol Hill protest billionaire Elon Musk's dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development on Feb. 5, 2025. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)

WASHINGTON — A federal judge in California ordered the Trump administration to immediately reinstate thousands of jobs for probationary federal workers fired as part of billionaire Elon Musk’s campaign to slash the federal workforce.

Judge William Alsup ruled Thursday morning that tens of thousands of workers must be rehired across numerous federal agencies, including the departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior, Treasury and Veterans Affairs, extending his previous temporary emergency order issued Feb. 28.

Alsup, appointed in 1999 by former President Bill Clinton to the Northern District of California, ruled in favor of numerous plaintiffs that brought the suit against the Trump administration’s Office of Personnel Management.

Alsup’s order also prohibits OPM from advising any federal agency on which employees to fire. Additionally, Alsup is requiring the agencies to provide documentation of compliance to the court, according to the plaintiffs who were present in the courtroom.

The Trump administration appealed the decision just hours later.

Unions bring suit

The plaintiffs, which include the American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO and other unions representing thousands of federal workers, sued in February over OPM’s “illegal program” terminating employees who are within the first year of their positions or recently promoted to new ones.

Everett Kelley, AFGE’s national president, said in statement Thursday that the union is “pleased with Judge Alsup’s order to immediately reinstate tens of thousands of probationary federal employees who were illegally fired from their jobs by an administration hellbent on crippling federal agencies and their work on behalf of the American public.”

“We are grateful for these employees and the critical work they do, and AFGE will keep fighting until all federal employees who were unjustly and illegally fired are given their jobs back,” Everett said.

The AFGE was among more than a dozen organizations who sued the government. The plaintiffs were represented by the legal advocacy group State Democracy Defenders Fund and the San Francisco-based law firm Altshuler Berzon LLP. Washington state also joined the case and was represented by state Attorney General Nick Brown.

Trump administration ‘will immediately fight’

The White House said prior to filing the appeal that “a single judge is attempting to unconstitutionally seize the power of hiring and firing from the Executive Branch.”

“The President has the authority to exercise the power of the entire executive branch – singular district court judges cannot abuse the power of the entire judiciary to thwart the President’s agenda. If a federal district court judge would like executive powers, they can try and run for President themselves. The Trump Administration will immediately fight back against this absurd and unconstitutional order,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

The unions argued in a Feb. 19 complaint that Congress “controls and authorizes” federal employment and spending, and that lawmakers have empowered federal agencies, not OPM, to manage their own employees.

OPM, which administers employee benefits and essentially serves as the government’s human resources arm, “lacks the constitutional, statutory, or regulatory authority to order federal agencies to terminate employees in this fashion that Congress has authorized those agencies to hire and manage,” according to the complaint.

“[A]nd OPM certainly has no authority to require agencies to perpetrate a massive fraud on the federal workforce by lying about federal workers’ ‘performance,’ to detriment of those workers, their families, and all those in the public and private sectors who rely upon those workers for important services,” the complaint continues.

Musk role

Musk, a Trump special adviser, has publicly and repeatedly touted the terminations as a means to cut federal spending.

Mass firings began in early to mid-February and continued as recently as Tuesday when the Department of Education announced it would cut about 50% of its workforce.

The terminations sparked numerous lawsuits and public outcry.

Musk, who the White House claims has no decision-making authority, has posted on his social media platform X about emails sent to federal workers offering buyouts and demanding they justify their jobs.

Musk has also published dozens of posts attacking federal judges who’ve ruled against his workforce downsizing as “evil” and “corrupt.”

U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Black Earth) addresses union members at a weekend rally in support of federal workers whose jobs are on the line under the administration of President Donald Trump. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Moves by the Trump administration to cut the federal workforce have caused chaos and fear inside agencies ranging from the U.S. Forest Service to the Social Security Administration, advocates for federal employees say.

Some two dozen Forest Service employees in Wisconsin returned to work Monday, five weeks after receiving termination notices and being walked out, as a result of a court order March 13 holding the termination notices issued on Valentine’s Day were illegal.

Wisconsin is home to some 18,000 federal workers, U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Black Earth) said at a rally in Madison Saturday — workers whose jobs are on the line under orders from Washington, D.C.

“I am getting record numbers of calls in our office, literally thousands of calls every single week,” Pocan said. “People are pissed. They’re upset about cuts to the Veterans Administration. They’re upset about what’s happening with the Social Security Administration. They’re upset about Medicare and Medicaid potential cuts. They’re upset about cuts to agriculture and education.”

At the Social Security Administration, the acting Social Security commissioner has announced plans to close regional offices and cut 7,000 jobs “through buyouts, layoffs, resignations and terminations,” said Jessica LaPointe, president of American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Council 220, who joined the Saturday rally at the headquarters of the South Central Federation of Labor. The council represents Social Security field office employees.

Social Security operations have been “historically understaffed,” LaPointe said, and the planned reductions “will lead to longer service delays, systems failures, and even inevitably benefit disruptions.”

In an interview with the Wisconsin Examiner during a Wisconsin visit in October, Martin O’Malley, Social Security commissioner at the time, said staff at the agency’s Madison field office has dropped by 40% since 2019. O’Malley said he told members of Congress they should increase staffing at the agency to restore “at least an adequate level of customer service.”

The cuts the agency has announced are “exacerbating the chaos, confusion and anxiety felt by workers under siege,” LaPointe said Saturday. She added that the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s project to slash operations across the federal government “are destroying the public’s ability to access timely and effective service from the Social Security Administration, with the intent — let’s be real about their intent — of turning the American people against Social Security.”

William Townsend, president of the AFGE local at the Department of Veterans Affairs VA hospital in Madison, said the department’s plan to cut 80,000 or more positions nationwide would be detrimental to the health care of veterans counting on the agency.

AFGE also represents employees at the Transportation Security Administration. The union and the Biden administration signed a new contract in 2024, but Trump administration TSA leaders told the union last month they were canceling the contract and would no longer recognize the union.

Nevertheless, said TSA worker and AFGE Local 777 president Darrell English, the union will continue to stand up for its members’ rights while conducting a legal battle to restore their union contract. “We know it’s going to be a long fight, but we’re here,” English said at Saturday’s rally.

At the U.S. Forest Service, 24 Wisconsin employees were fired on Feb. 14 — part of a wave of thousands of “probationary” employees let go, said Carl Houtman, a union official.

Houtman works at the Forest Service Products Laboratory in Madison and is president of the National Federation of Federal Employees union local there. He is also the national negotiation chair for the union’s Forest Service Council. In an interview Monday, he stipulated he was speaking strictly as a union leader, not as a Forest Service representative.

About 170 of the Forest Service’s 672 Wisconsin employees work at the laboratory, researching the use of wood as a building material and wood chemistry for papermaking and in a variety of new applications. Most of the other Forest Service employees in the state are associated with the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest in northern Wisconsin.

After a series of legal challenges, a federal judge in California ordered the Trump administration to reinstate the fired probationary workers, ruling that Trump administration officials hadn’t followed required procedures.  

The fired workers returned Monday, said Houtman, including a colleague who was among those who had been dismissed.

“It’s crazy the inefficiency that has caused,” he said Monday. “They walked her out the door, took her computer and her door card, and they basically had to hire her back. In this intervening month she could have been reasonably doing her job, but the agency was forced” by the federal Office of Personnel Management, now under the Trump administration’s control, “to fire these people.”

The federal judge’s ruling requires the administration to follow the legal procedures for reducing the federal workforce. Houtman said federal workers and their unions involved in the February firing expect to learn more about the administration’s intentions in the next month.

“We anticipate about the middle of April getting an idea about what’s going on,” he said. “It’s possible that a large number of people in Wisconsin will get wiped out — we just don’t know.”

Houtman said there are concerns among employees that “this administration wants to wipe out the science arm of the Forest Service” and possibly sell most or all federally owned forest land, harming the nation’s natural resources.

Established in 1910, the forest products lab remains a vital source of research, he said. Its findings help shape codes and standards for building as well as for product manufacturing — such as a project currently underway to develop a consistent test for how recyclable consumer packaging is.

The lab also plays a role in training new scientists, he added.

“Most of the probationary employees were new hires, starting to learn wood science from us,” Houtman said. “You basically have wiped out the next generation of scientists. It’s going to do irreparable harm.”

Billionaire Elon Musk, a senior adviser to President Donald Trump, arrives for a meeting with Senate Republicans at the U.S. Capitol on March 5, 2025. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — With thousands of federal workers already laid off, President Donald Trump said Thursday that he wants his Cabinet members to “keep good people” and does not want to “see a big cut where a lot of good people are cut.”

Trump, in meeting with his Cabinet members and other officials earlier in the day, also informed them that billionaire Elon Musk could guide departments on what to do but would not make staffing or policy decisions for the agencies, according to reporting by POLITICO.

Trump and Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service have taken on massive efforts to try to reduce federal government spending — leading to dizzying cuts across wide swaths of the federal workforce.

Those mass firings have prompted a slew of lawsuits filed in federal court and questions about the extent of Musk’s authority within the executive branch.

The president, speaking to reporters Thursday afternoon, said the Cabinet meeting focused on those massive reductions within the federal government.

Asked what Trump told Cabinet members Thursday regarding Musk and his authority to carry out actions, the president said they had “a great meeting” and clarified that “the people that aren’t doing a good job, that are unreliable, don’t show up to work, etcetera — those people can be cut.”

Musk’s role 

Musk also, according to POLITICO, has reportedly admitted that DOGE has made some mistakes.

Trump, who told the press several times Thursday that he wants the Cabinet members to “keep good people,” said “we’re going to be watching them, and Elon and the group are going to be watching them, and if they can cut, it’s better, and if they don’t cut, then Elon will do the cutting.”

The president also said he thinks Musk and the DOGE service have done “an amazing job.”

DOGE stands for Department of Government Efficiency, although the entity is not a Cabinet department and is temporary under a Trump executive order.

“We want to get rid of the people that aren’t working, that aren’t showing up and have a lot of problems, and so they’re working together with Elon, and I think we’re doing a really great job. We’re cutting it down. We have to, for the sake of our country,” Trump said.