Well, that didn’t take long. The D.C. swamp is in full panic mode after President Trump’s administration took steps to drain it, and now activist judges are stepping in to try and stop him. Late Thursday, a second federal judge ordered the administration to reinstate probationary federal workers who were let go in what was clearly a long-overdue effort to streamline a bloated bureaucracy.
Let’s break this down: U.S. District Judge James Bredar—an Obama appointee, of course—ruled that the Trump administration somehow ignored labor laws when dismissing these employees, despite the fact that they were still in their probationary period and therefore not entitled to the same civil service protections as permanent federal workers.
He hit pause on the firings for two weeks and ordered agencies to restore these positions. In other words, another Democrat judge swooping in to protect the permanent administrative state.
And this comes right after U.S. District Judge William Alsup—another liberal judge, this time a Clinton appointee—issued a similar ruling in the morning, declaring that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and its acting director, Charles Ezell, lacked the authority to direct the layoffs. He ordered six major departments, including Veterans Affairs and Defense, to reinstate workers and provide a list of probationary employees within a week.
What’s really happening here? It’s simple: Trump is doing what he promised—shrinking the federal government, cutting unnecessary positions, and clearing out the bureaucratic dead weight that has only served to expand government power while eroding American freedom. And naturally, the Left can’t stand it.
Of course, unions and left-wing advocacy groups rushed to sue, and sure enough, the courts handed them a win—because Democrat-appointed judges will always find a way to prop up the entrenched bureaucratic class. The administration, meanwhile, has appealed, making it clear that these firings were about performance, not a mass layoff. But facts don’t seem to matter when the goal is to keep the federal workforce as bloated as possible.
Here’s the kicker: probationary workers are exactly who should be let go if they’re not fit for the job. These aren’t tenured employees with years of experience—these are new hires or recently promoted individuals who still need to prove themselves. They don’t have the same protections as permanent employees for a reason. The idea that every single one of these dismissals was unlawful is absurd.
And yet, when Alsup scheduled an evidentiary hearing to actually look at the administration’s reasoning, OPM’s Ezell didn’t even show up. Why? Probably because these agencies know full well that explaining the firings in court would be an unnecessary charade—the law is clear, but the judges already made up their minds.
There are about 200,000 probationary workers across federal agencies. The idea that every single one of them should be guaranteed a permanent government paycheck is exactly the kind of bureaucratic rot that Trump was elected to clean up. And yet, every time his administration tries to do just that, the courts, the unions, and the career bureaucrats scramble to block it.
