- The Merit System Protections Board, an independent agency overseeing the fairness of federal employment, has seen an avalanche of petitions following President Donald Trump’s orders to cull the federal workforce. Fired federal workers said they were fired for performance reasons, despite overwhelmingly positive performance reviews. Allegations of poor performance mean fired probationary employees won’t get severance pay, and it will likely be harder for them to be rehired for public sector jobs.
A major government employment watchdog overseeing the fairness of agency firings has been flooded with claims following President Donald Trump’s purge of federal workers.
The Merit System Protections Board, an independent agency working to ensure government jobs are awarded on merit, has received as much as a 2,100% increase in cases from federal employees appealing their dismissals, including those alleging they were subject to illegal discrimination or disputing charges of poor performance.
Five months ago, the board had typically received about 100 petitions every week. From Feb. 16 to 22—the week following many terminations—1,805 petitions came in. The week after, it got 2,171 more, a 20-fold increase of its typical quota. Most recently, from March 2 to 8, MSPB received 1,503 petitions.
Culling the federal workforce, which Trump says is about cutting costs, has been a key effort in his second administration despite government employees sounding the alarm on the firings, throwing their agencies into chaos and jeopardizing their future job prospects. About 30,000 federal employees, most of whom were probationary, were swiftly sacked in the first months of Trump’s administration, Axios reported.
The surge in cases the MSPB received correlates with the rollout of firings. The Office of Personnel Management, which reports to the White House, sent out a memo on Jan. 20 asking agencies to provide a list identifying all probationary employees. On Feb. 14, OPM requested agencies fire many of those listed probationary workers by Feb. 17.
The 'poor performance' death knell
Many fired federal workers said their letters of termination all listed “performance” as the reason for their terminations, despite receiving overwhelmingly positive performance reviews weeks earlier. Katrina Le Blanc, a former policy analyst at the National Institute of Health’s Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke, told Fortune her supervisors warned her higher management had to select a reason for termination—either misconduct or poor performance—and they chose performance
“I just want you to know that that's not true,” she recalled her supervisor telling her.
These “poor performance” reasons stamped on termination letters are a death knell for federal employees who are continuing to seek government employment. The reasons for firings are listed on an employee's Standard Form 50 (SF-50), a document in their personnel files that are viewable to prospective federal employers, threatening their chances of getting another government job, workers told Fortune. Probationary employees terminated for performance reasons are also not eligible for severance pay, according to OPM.
The MSPB and OPM did not respond to Fortune’s requests for comment.
A Kafkaesque appeals process
As cases pile on, the chances of the MSPB hearing them is slim. The MSPB was non-functional during Trump’s first administration, as he did not appoint the key board member necessary for the body to achieve the quorum required to hear employee appeals. From Jan. 7, 2017 to March 2, 2022, the MSPB could not vote or review any petitions. To put the current rush of petitions into perspective, the cases already received by the MSPB exceed the backlog it accumulated during nearly five years it was non-functional.
Trump is using the same playbook in his second term: He fired Cathy A. Harris, one of the five heads of the watchdog group, in February. A federal judge ruled the action illegal last week.
The MSPB is currently functional, but the Office of Special Counsel, another federal body charged with protecting government workers from political retaliation or discrimination, is on shakier ground. Trump fired OSC head Hampton Dellinger on Feb. 7, and Dellinger has decided not to pursue a legal battle against the president’s decision.
Fired employees need to act fast if they want to appeal, as they must do so within 10 days of their dismissal. That way, an employee could be eligible for back pay if their firing is deemed unjustified, according to Nate Brought, former director of the NIH’s Office of the Executive Secretariat, who resigned last month because he disagreed with the agency’s direction.
The stop-start appeals process is bad news for both fired employees, as well as the federal government. The government must pay the accrued interest on any back pay it owes, and fired federal employees may not have access to back pay for years, Gregory McGillivary, a labor lawyer representing federal workers in a class-action lawsuit alleging privacy violations, told Fortune.
“It's really a tragedy for the federal employees, because people don’t have any sort of swift justice for illegal firings,” he said.
