Unions Win Right to Challenge Trump Layoffs Through Courts (2)

Public sector unions can challenge the firings of their members in federal court, in addition to bringing the disputes to independent administrative boards, a federal judge said.

The ruling is a major win for employee unions challenging the Trump administration’s efforts to cut down the federal workforce, opening the door for more legal challenges of policies that triggered thousands of terminations.

Unions can bring their claims about the firing of 16,000 probationary workers to the US District Court for the Northern District of California, Judge William Alsup said late Monday, reversing his previous order on the topic.

“My earlier ruling to the contrary was mistaken,” Alsup wrote.

Alsup’s order creates an opening for federal workers’ unions to overturn the Trump administration’s mass terminations in court, rather than bringing them to the Merit Systems Protection Board and Federal Labor Relations Authority. Both panels mediate government workforce disputes. The law doesn’t empower the unions to challenge a “mass removal” at the MSPB and FLRA, Alsup said.

Federal judges in D.C. and Massachusetts earlier this year reached different conclusions, ruling that federal courts lacked subject matter jurisdiction to hear unions’ claims. Both judges pointed to the MSPB and FLRA as options.

The Trump administration said it terminated more than 25,000 probationary employees, workers new to their roles, last month. Acting Office of Personnel Management Director Chuck Ezell, one of the defendants in the California case, told agency heads in a Jan. 20 memo that such employees can’t appeal their firing to the MSPB. He directed the leaders to consider firing them.

The Trump administration in recent weeks moved to undermine both the MSPB and FLRA by terminating their leaders and creating partisan deadlocks at both agencies. Alsup didn’t address that issue in his order.

Alsup in his ruling pointed to Maryland v. United States Department of Agriculture, a case brought by states challenging the firing of more than 25,000 probationary federal workers.

This order “is not the first to decide district courts have subject-matter jurisdiction to hear claims related to the same OPM directive to terminate probationary employees,” he said. In Maryland, state governments complained of the federal government’s failure to notify them before probationary workers’ mass terminations, as the law requires.

The district court in Maryland concluded that civil service laws “provided no prospect for judicial recourse,” and it “does not preclude this court’s jurisdiction,” Alsup said.

The plaintiffs’ attorneys and the government did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Bloomberg Law about Alsup’s ruling.

The Trump administration on Monday asked the Supreme Court to overturn Alsup’s March 13 order directing the Trump administration to rehire the 16,000 employees who were terminated in February.

Altshuler Berzon LLP and State Democracy Defenders Fund represent the plaintiffs. The US Department of Justice represents OPM.

The case is Am. Fed. of Gov’t Emp. v. OPM, N.D. Cal., No. 3:25-cv-01780, Order 3/24/25.