Second judge orders Trump administration to rehire probationary workers let go in mass firings

Federal judges in California and Maryland on Thursday ordered US President Donald Trump’s administration to reinstate thousands of probationary federal workers who lost their jobs as part of mass firings carried out at 19 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.

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