A coalition of 20 Democratic attorneys general filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration Friday for firing thousands of probationary federal workers without providing advance notice.
Led by New York Attorney General c, the plaintiffs argue the mass terminations violate federal law, which they argue mandates at least 60 days’ notice before large-scale layoffs. The lawsuit centers on various Office of Personnel Management (OPM) directives instructing agencies to review the employment of thousands of probationary employees “based on agency judgement regarding mission needs.”
“These large-scale, indiscriminate firings are not only subjecting the Plaintiff states and communities across the country to chaos. They are also against the law,” the complaint reads.
The lawsuit seeks an immediate injunction to halt further terminations and reinstate any federal workers who were fired since Jan. 20. Attorneys general from Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia also joined the suit.
The complaint contends that the Trump administration, in an effort to slash the federal workforce through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), ordered agencies to terminate probationary employees en masse — an alleged violation of a federal law requiring agencies to provide 60 days notice before carrying out Reductions in Force (RIFs).
At least 372 federal employees in New York alone have filed for unemployment in the past two weeks, according to the lawsuit. More than 1,000 Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) employees were among those fired, including staff at VA hospitals in New York. Other impacted agencies include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which approved the hiring of over 87,000 new IRS employees under former President Joe Biden.
“It has rendered them jobless without providing any advance notice that might have given them the opportunity to seek other employment or even budget to prepare for the loss of income,” the lawsuit reads.
The president offered some 2 million eligible federal workers a “deferred resignation” severance package of eight months of pay and benefits in an OPM memo Jan. 28.
“OPM is not directing agencies to take any specific performance-based actions regarding probationary employees,” OPM wrote in a memo updated March 4 after a series of legal challenges against DOGE’s workforce streamlining efforts. “Agencies have ultimate decision-making authority over, and responsibility for, such personnel actions.”
Musk previously defended the workforce cuts as necessary for democracy, characterizing executive agencies as bloated and unaccountable to elected leaders.
“If bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?” he said. “It does not match the will of the people, so it’s just something we’ve got to fix.”
A date has not yet been set for the lawsuit’s first hearing.
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