George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said Thursday on Fox News that the federal judge’s ruling on the Trump administration’s review of probationary workers was “quite a reach.”
U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled Thursday that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) will need to rescind their directives of initiating firings of federal probationary workers, saying the office does not hold “authority whatsoever, under any statute in the history of the universe, to hire and fire employees at another agency.” On “The Ingraham Angle,” Fox host Laura Ingraham read Alsup’s ruling to Turley and asked for his legal take.
“I think that’s quite a reach for this judge, because the office was not firing these workers. It was directing agencies to look at these workers and fire them according to guidelines. They are part of a unitary department, an executive branch that is headed by a president who has said that he wants this to happen,” Turley said.
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“So I think that the court may be slicing this a little too thin because the Trump Administration is saying that order was for agencies themselves to make these decisions, review these positions, and they also said, ‘It is clear, we want to downsize the federal government, and the exception is that many, if not most of these people, will not be maintained.’ The president of the United States is allowed to run the executive branch, including running it with fewer people than his predecessor,” Turley said.
Within a memo sent by the OPM on Jan. 20, the office’s Acting Director Charles Ezell provided updated guidelines to the agencies regarding “critical potential personnel actions,” specifically addressing both probationary periods and administrative leave and details. In the memo, Ezell called probationary periods an “essential tool” to “assess employee performance and manage staffing levels,” adding how employees can be “terminated during that period without triggering appeal rights to the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB).”
The OPM memo detailed the office’s regulations and highlighted four areas in which paid administrative leave was appropriate, which are: “the absence is directly related to the agency’s mission,” “the absence is officially sponsored or sanctioned by the agency,” “the absence will clearly enhance the professional development or skills of the employee in the employee’s current position,” or “the absence is in the interest of the agency or of the Government as a whole.”
Ezell gave agencies no later than Jan. 24 to “identify all employees on probationary periods, who have served less than a year in a competitive service appointment, or who have served less than two years in an excepted service appointment,” and send a report to OPM determining whether the employees should be retained at the agency.
Following the memo, a lawsuit was filed by labor unions, alleging the OPM unlawfully ordered agencies to carry out the firings. While a California federal judge temporarily blocked OPM’s directives, the judge said he could halt the Department of Defense’s actions, which are expected to lay off approximately 5,400 probationary workers, according to a DOD statement released Feb. 21.
A written order is expected to be released, along with another court hearing, on March 13, according to The Washington Post.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Screenshot/Fox News/”The Ingraham Angle”)
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