US judges order Trump administration to reinstate thousands of fired workers

federal workers who lost their jobs as part of mass firings carried out across multiple agencies.

The back-to-back rulings were the most significant blow yet to the effort by Trump and top adviser Elon Musk to drastically shrink the federal bureaucracy. Government agencies face a Thursday deadline to submit plans for a second wave of mass layoffs and to slash their budgets.

U.S. District Judge James Bredar in Baltimore agreed with 20 Democratic-led states that 18 agencies which had fired probationary employees en masse in recent weeks violated regulations governing the laying off of federal workers.

His decision came hours after U.S. District Judge William Alsup during a hearing in San Francisco ordered the reinstatement of probationary employees terminated at the U.S. Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy, Department of Interior and the Treasury Department.

Alsup said the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the human resources department for federal agencies, had improperly ordered those agencies to fire workers en masse even though it lacked the power to do so.

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«It is a sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that's a lie,» said Alsup, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt in a statement said Alsup lacked the power to issue the ruling and that the administration would «immediately fight back.»

«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