Trump administration reinstating nearly 25,000 fired federal workers

US President Donald Trump’s administration is working to bring back nearly 25,000 fired federal workers after judges ruled their terminations were illegal, court documents show.

Officials at 18 departments and agencies have submitted documents to a federal court detailing their efforts to rehire the laid off probationary workers to comply with the court orders.

Last week, two federal judges said the mass layoffs of the recently hired workers was illegal and ordered them to be reinstated pending further litigation.

The firings were part of Trump’s efforts to slash the federal workforce, assisted by billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge).

The filings made in a Baltimore federal court on Monday paint a clearer picture of the scale of layoffs across the federal government.

They reveal that 7,600 people had been laid off from the Treasury Department, 5,700 from the Department of Agriculture, more than 3,200 from the Department of Health and Human Services, and hundreds from other departments and agencies.

Many of the reinstated workers will not be heading straight back to work; they will instead be placed on administrative leave.

On 13 March, Judge James Bredar of Maryland and Judge William Alsup of California ordered the agencies to rehire thousands of fired probationary workers.

Judge Bredar’s ruling did not stop the agencies from firing the workers, but took issue with the manner in which it was done.

His decision came after a lawsuit was brought by 19 Democratic-led states and Washington DC, which argued that mass layoffs would trigger a rise in unemployment claims and add pressure on social services.

In a later response to the government’s efforts to reinstate the workers, the judge said the agencies had made “meaningful progress toward compliance”.

Separately, Judge Alsup criticised the decision to place the rehired workers on administrative leave, telling government lawyers that it “would not restore the services the preliminary injunction intends to restore”.

In response, the justice department said in its filings that placing workers on administrative leave was the first step towards fully reinstating them.

The department has appealed both federal court decisions.

These are not the only rulings against the US government’s effort to reduce the size of the bureaucracy.

On Tuesday, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration from taking any further steps to shut down the US Agency for International Development (USAID).