Reinstated, but Not Back to Work: Fired Workers Linger in ‘Limbo’

Erin Cagney was supposed to hear on Monday that she could go back to doing the job she loved — as an archaeologist with the National Park Service in Washington, D.C. But the day came and went without a word.

Ms. Cagney finally learned her fate on Wednesday evening. She was being reinstated, but immediately being placed on administrative leave.

“I desperately want to return to my job,” she said in an interview on Wednesday. “I don’t want to be on administrative leave, in limbo, for some unknown duration of time.”

Ms. Cagney, first ensnared in the Trump administration’s purge of thousands of probationary employees, now finds herself caught in the slow-motion chaos playing out across the government as 18 federal agencies contend with two court orders requiring workers to be rehired.

In interviews, more than a dozen fired probationary workers described a kind of purgatory in which information about their livelihoods and what might happen next was difficult, if not impossible, to come by. Most of the fired workers interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing for their future job prospects and citing their desire to get back to work.

In some cases, fired employees say they have received emails informing them of their reinstatement. Some have seen back pay appear in their bank accounts.

But more than a dozen federal agencies — including the Interior Department, Ms. Cagney’s parent agency — have reinstated employees and immediately placed them on administrative leave, according to interviews and a review of status updates provided by agencies that were filed in court.

Several workers said that this indefinite period of leave has only unnerved them further as agencies eye deep additional cuts ordered by President Trump.

“I worry that that means they’re just planning to put us in a wider layoff in the future,” Ms. Cagney said.

For the Trump administration, firing thousands of federal employees with probationary status was relatively quick work, with waves of dismissals rolling out in February at the direction of the Office of Personnel Management, the government’s human resources arm. Reinstatements have proved more difficult, human resources officials detailed in court filings.

Restoring all the fired employees to “full duty status” would impose significant burdens on the Energy Department, “and cause significant confusion and turmoil for the terminated employees,” the agency’s acting chief human capital officer, Reesha Trznadel, wrote in a status report on Monday. The report was filed to two federal judges, James Bredar of the District of Maryland and William H. Alsup of the Northern District of California.

The judges are presiding over legal challenges to the probationary terminations, two of many lawsuits filed against the government because of the indiscriminate firings of federal workers since Mr. Trump took office. The Energy Department fired 555 probationary employees in February, Ms. Trznadel wrote.

Rehiring the employees, she wrote, means filling out paperwork, issuing new security badges and government equipment and restoring security clearances. Ms. Trznadel said all 555 employees had been reinstated by the end of the day on Monday and then placed on administrative leave.

Other agencies’ court declarations were similar, laying out the challenges with complying with the court order and stating how far along they were in reinstatements. In some cases, sections of the declarations are identical.

Judge Alsup has taken issue with agencies’ placing reinstated employees on administrative leave rather than fully bringing them back to work, signaling the potential for further action on the issue. Late Monday, he ordered the agencies involved in the case before him to respond the next day with details about the number of employees placed on administrative leave.

The government responded Tuesday in a court filing that administrative leave was just one stage in the process of returning the probationary employees to their jobs, but did not give further details or a timeline for next steps.

The mass firing of probationary workers in February is part of Mr. Trump’s larger plan to drastically reduce and remake the federal bureaucracy. The president has entrusted the tech billionaire Elon Musk with designing the restructuring, a task Mr. Musk at one point illustrated by waving a chain saw that had been given to him onstage at a conservative conference.

“This is the chain saw for bureaucracy,” Mr. Musk told the crowd.

The government has appealed the decisions that ordered the reinstatements. And in court filings, government human resource officials said the chance that these orders could be reversed on appeal adds another layer of complication to their work.

“In short, employees could be subjected to multiple changes in their employment status in a matter of weeks,” Mark Engelbaum, the assistant secretary at Veterans Affairs for human resources, wrote in his declaration. Veterans Affairs fired about 1,900 probationary workers, he said. As of Monday, 1,683 were still terminated.

That was in part because the agency has struggled to find personal email addresses for many of the fired workers, Mr. Engelbaum wrote.

The firings and subsequent re-hirings have caused widespread confusion for workers who want to know when and if they will get their jobs back, and how long they might get to keep them. They also have questions about unemployment benefits.

Ms. Cagney, from the Interior Department, said that she tried to join her husband’s insurance after she was fired and before learning of her reinstatement, only to learn that her federal plan had not been canceled.

“My provider that I had with the federal government doesn’t seem to know that I was fired,” she said. “And maybe I’m not fired anymore? I don’t know.”

Some of the agencies have struggled to make do without the fired employees.

“The tremendous uncertainty associated with this confusion and these administrative burdens impede supervisors from appropriately managing their work force,” Mark D. Green, a senior human resources official at the Interior Department, told the court.

“Work schedules and assignments are effectively being tied to hearing and briefing schedules set by the courts,” Mr. Green continued.

He was the only human resources official out of the 17 who filed declarations to the court to raise the additional complications to everyday work that these firings and re-hirings have caused.

“Reinstating terminated appointees interferes with the effective functioning of the department,” Mr. Green wrote, adding that the agency had made changes after the February firings to fill the gaps left behind. He said many of the terminated employees “will have no duties to perform upon reinstatement.”