The Laken Riley Act was signed into law by US President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington on January 29, 2025. (Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Sipa USA/Sipa via AP Images)
Around 5,900 probationary employees at the U.S. Department of Agriculture faced firings by President Donald Trump since he assumed office in January. However, the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board has intervened to temporarily halt these terminations.
MSPB member Cathy Harris, who is currently in a challenging position herself, issued a stay on Wednesday. The board criticized the firings, labeling them as premeditated actions and a breach of proper personnel procedures.
“I find that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the agency engaged in a prohibited personnel practice,” Harris wrote in the MSPB order, noting how Biden ethics enforcer Hampton Dellinger — who is battling Trump’s Justice Department in federal court over his firing at the Office of Special Counsel — provided findings from an OSC investigation on the USDA removals this week that “reasonably” alleges and outlines personnel violations by the Trump administration.
Harris said the board believed there were “reasonable grounds” to stay the firings for 45 days while MSPB members continue to investigate, on account of there being so many people involved.
“Because there is a possibility that additional individuals, not specifically named in the agency’s response, may be affected by these probationary terminations, and given the assertions made in OSC’s initial stay request and the deference to which we afford OSC in the context of an initial stay request, I find that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the agency terminated the aforementioned probationary employees in violation of (civil service laws),” Harris explained.
Dellinger, who was appointed by Joe Biden in 2024 to lead the Office of Special Counsel and enforce whistleblower laws, filed a petition last Friday with the MSPB asking it to stay the firings of the nearly 6,000 workers who were sent packing “without consideration of their individual performance or fitness for federal employment,” the document alleged.
“Rather … it did not identify their positions as ‘mission-critical,”” Dellinger said. “USDA made no attempt to assess the individual performance or conduct of any of these probationary employees before deciding whether to terminate them.”
Dellinger was axed by Trump in January “in a one-sentence email,” according to a lawsuit he filed last month in the District of Columbia. Last Saturday, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that Dellinger’s termination from the Office of Special Counsel after Trump took office in January was illegal and unprecedented.
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Harris, meanwhile, was fired on Feb. 10 in an email from an assistant that told her she was “terminated, effective immediately.”
A federal judge on Tuesday reinstated Harris — a Joe Biden appointee whose term expires in 2028 — temporarily after she sued to regain her position. Speaking in a 35-page memorandum opinion, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras ruled firmly in Harris’ favor by granting her a preliminary injunction. The decision was based on a 1935 U.S. Supreme Court case keeping “quasi judicial and quasi legislative” agencies largely insulated from the whims of the president.
