The Trump administration has quietly clarified a directive that spurred the firing of tens of thousands of government workers, after the lay-offs sowed chaos across the country.
The move came in the form of a short update to a memo first circulated hours after President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, asking government departments to compile a list of staff who had been employed for less than a year and justify their retention. As of May last year, this encompassed at least 200,000 federal workers.
The memo from the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM, which has become a main vehicle for billionaire Trump ally Elon Musk’s cost-cutting drive, was interpreted by many agencies as a directive to let go of probationary employees, resulting in at least 20,000 lay-offs.
Those fired in recent weeks include civilian staff at the defence department, employees working on veterans affairs and workers in charge of safeguarding America’s nuclear stockpiles.
An addition to the memo appeared on Tuesday, saying “please note that, by this memorandum, OPM is not directing agencies to take any specific performance-based actions regarding probationary employees”. The OPM added that individual agencies had “responsibility for such personnel actions”.
The office declined to comment on the change. A person familiar with the OPM’s decision said it had always been up to agencies to determine wether to fire employees, and the edit was intended as a clarification “in light of a recent court order and some public misinformation”.
The new message came after a federal judge last week barred the OPM from firing probationary workers at specific government departments, clarifying that the office “does not have any authority whatsoever under any statute in the history of the universe to hire and fire employees at another agency”.
Judge William Alsup said there was a “mountain of evidence” that the OPM memo was taken as a directive, not mere guidance.
Alsup also reiterated that the “ongoing, en masse termination of probationary employees across the federal government’s agencies has sown significant chaos”.
He cited the termination of more than 1,000 employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs that “crippled the agency’s administration of the Veterans Crisis Line”, which among other things offers emergency assistance to those contemplating suicide or self-harm.
While Alsop did not order agencies to reinstate those who had already been fired, some departments have already begun to do so. Some probationary employees fired from the National Science Foundation last month began to be rehired on Monday, the agency said in a statement.
The US government was also forced last month to rehire employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration.
The edit to the memo was made hours before Trump was scheduled to give his State of the Union address to Congress. Many Democrats have said they will bring federal workers who have been fired to the event.