We’ll see what happens with Thursday’s ruling reinstating thousands of probationary federal employees, issued by a San Francisco federal judge, William Alsup, who is in senior status, having been appointed by President Clinton 26 years ago. This is the bottom-up part of President Trump’s effort — led by Elon Musk and DOGE — to pare back the federal workforce and the administrative state. That is, it targets the 2.2 million-member workforce, not those at the helm.
As we’ve covered in recent weeks, this has been coming: Before the president’s firing of Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger was finally upheld by the D.C. Circuit this week, Dellinger used the reinstatement granted him by an Obama appointee, Judge Amy Berman Jackson, to petition a Biden appointee to the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), the now-retired Raymond Limon, to reinstate a half-dozen probationary federal employees. Meantime, Limon’s MSPB colleague, Biden-appointed Chairwoman Cathy Harris, who had also been fired by the president, convinced another Obama appointee, Judge Rudolph Contreras, to reinstate her; she then used this new lease on life to reinstate about 6,000 more probationary employees.
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