The Washington Post reports:

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Office of Personnel Management to rescind directives that initiated the mass firing of probationary workers across the government, ruling that the terminations were probably illegal, as a group of labor unions argued in court.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup ordered OPM to rescind its previous directives to more than two dozen agencies, including the Department of Defense, the Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Science Foundation and others identified in a lawsuit. The ruling — a temporary restraint on the government that will be revisited in the coming weeks — is one of the biggest roadblocks so far to President Donald Trump’s effort to slash the federal workforce.

“Congress has given the authority to hire and fire to the agencies themselves. The Department of Defense, for example, has statutory authority to hire and fire,” Alsup said from the bench as he handed down the ruling Thursday evening in federal court in San Francisco. “The Office of Personnel Management does not have any authority whatsoever, under any statute in the history of the universe, to hire and fire employees at another agency. They can hire and fire their own employees.” [Continue reading…]

Politico reports:

A federal judge has ordered Trump administration officials involved in Elon Musk’s “opaque” Department of Government Efficiency to testify under oath in one of the sprawling lawsuits seeking to block DOGE’s access to sensitive government databases.

U.S. District Judge John Bates agreed Thursday that “very limited” efforts to question officials connected to DOGE would help clarify what exactly the group is doing and whether it poses the risks to sensitive data that government employees fear. Bates’ order will allow unions and liberal groups suing to question four officials: one from DOGE’s White House headquarters and one each from the Labor Department, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

While the bureaucracy-slashing DOGE effort has sparked more than a dozen lawsuits, the order from Bates is the first that would force people involved in the project to answer questions from lawyers outside the government.

Those depositions will be capped at eight hours in total, ruled Bates, a Washington-based appointee of President George W. Bush.

Neither Bates nor the unions and liberal groups that brought the suit specified which particular DOGE members will be questioned under oath. They will be selected by the Trump administration, but must be knowledgeable about the data security and access issues within the agencies at the center of the suit.

So far, the only insight about DOGE’s operations inside agencies like Labor and HHS have come from carefully crafted written statements filed in court by DOGE allies embedded across the government, and a handful of agency officials who work alongside them. Bates pointed to those statements as a reason to allow the depositions. [Continue reading…]