Late on Thursday the Department of Energy reinstated fired employees, officially returning them to their previous positions with an effective date of the date of their firing, according to reporting from POLITICO’s E&E News. This move does seem like an actual reinstatement; the memo informing employees of their un-firing included a note that they would receive badges and equipment immediately, so they “can resume work as soon as possible.”
The National Institutes of Health, inside the Department of Health and Human Services, appears to be taking a slightly different tack. In a message sent out Monday afternoon and viewed by Splinter, NIH human resources cited the ruling by Maryland District Judge James Bredar — but stopped short of actually returning the fired employees to work. “You will remain in a paid administrative leave status until further notice,” it read, raising once again the question of just how much the Department of Government Efficiency actually cares about its supposed purpose.
In theory, many thousands more fired workers should get some version of these messages soon, if the courts are still functioning as the check on executive power that they are intended to be. California Judge William Alsup’s ruling covered six agencies, including Energy along with Interior, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Defense, and the Treasury, but Bredar’s extended to 18 federal bodies, supposedly with a deadline of 1 pm on Monday and extending for 14 days. That doesn’t mean they’ll all listen, of course; the agencies now have varying degrees of fanatics running the show, and the administration has already filed appeals to both rulings.
This is, obviously, an untenable way to run the government. Not everyone who gets fired is sitting calmly at home waiting to head back to the office, and the on-again, off-again, likely on-again nature of all this just further breaks down morale and literally breaks the functions the agencies perform. Which is, again, the point.
Update, 3/17 4:30 PM: A source at NOAA told Splinter that a similar move was made to what NIH did, reinstating fired employees but in a “non-duty” capacity, meaning they are getting paid but have no access to email or other resources and cannot actually perform their jobs’ functions.
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