Firing the federal workforce, with dignity

“In a democratic society, ill-treatment is never an appropriate response to problems facing the authorities.”

To take a dignity-centered approach to things is simply to think about the humanity of the people who are affected and to try to minimize the adverse impacts of actions on people so that they can live with dignity and lead fulfilling lives.

As everyone knows by now, the United States government has embarked on a project of “mass” firings in the federal government. In (so far), at least three separate programs, the President, and his multi-billionaire side-kick, have incentivized some people to leave their positions by offering a severance package, fired people who were deemed “probationary,”[1] and by engaging in “large-scale reductions in force throughout federal agencies,”  as described by District Court judge Christopher Cooper in an unsuccessful case challenging all three programs.

There is now a Wikipedia page for “2025 United States federal mass layoffs” and judges, including Judge Cooper, are accepting the fact that “Mass firing of probationary employees” is now underway.”

The term “mass” (as in “mass incarceration”) should be the first signal that human dignity is not top of mind. Any kind of mass action, by definition, will affect large numbers of people without attention to individual circumstances.

But dignity demands that we pay attention to the human being who receives career ends within minutes of opening their email.

Courts in some countries have insisted that when government imposes a burden on a person, it makes the determination on an individual basis. In one case in South Africa, the Constitutional Court said that in a case of mass eviction, mediation was necessary, so that the evicted persons could advocate for themselves, and could be seen by others and see themselves not as victims but as active agents in their own lives. Port Elizabeth Municipality v Various Occupiers. In a case about summary termination of government employees after only one month of service, the Lahore High Court in Pakistan wrote: “The impugned order … reduces the petitioners to mere chattels who can be pushed around, in and out of service without due process…. It is to curb these dehumanizing actions of the government that Article 14 (protecting dignity and privacy) stand[s] strong and tall in the Constitution.” Faisal Sultan v. Executive District Officer of Education. This is what it means to adhere to the simple command of treating every person “as a person.”

Indeed, it is the very act of treating someone as part of a “mass” that is dehumanizing. The termination notices were generic in each agency and not tied to a particular employee’s actual performance and sometimes in direct contradiction to their record: many people who had “stellar” performance reviews or earned maximum ratings were terminated for poor performance. These individuals are effectively unable to rebut the black mark on their employment records.

It is worse when the people most harmed by the government policy are now, in the eyes of the public, the cause of “waste, bloat, and insularity” in the government, as Executive Order 14210 describes it.

And it is worse still when people who are already living in precarity lose whatever emotional and financial security they derived from their employment with the federal government. In many cases, because Americans don’t have universal health care but only employment-based health care, losing a job means losing health insurance. In other cases, it means losing housing or other benefits on which lives depend.

Many people have written about the “chaos” that this “astounding’ purge” has caused. And while there is no end of terrible consequences that these actions will have on the functioning of the United States government, perhaps the worse is not the effect on the government but the effect on people.

In a constitutional democracy dedicated to the respect for human dignity, the courts might be available to vindicate those people whose dignity has been violated. This has not been the case so far in America. In the most recent ruling in a case brought by unions, federal District Judge Christopher Cooper rejected the unions’ claims, finding that the federal courts of the United States have no jurisdiction to hear claims against the federal government on behalf of fired employees.

That, too, seems wrong. Like many other courts around the world, courts in the United States might – without interfering with separation of powers or limiting the power of the administration to advance its policy goals – say that whatever action the government takes, it must, at the very least, respect the humanity of each person affected. It could allow firing not on the basis of an individual’s vulnerable employees (the only thing that distinguishes probationary employees from others) but on the basis of an individualized finding that the position must be eliminated. It could allow firing with off-boarding support and resources to assist with housing, health care, and of course, alternative employment options. And so on. In a country committed to the value of human dignity, the courts should be its protectors of last resort.

And there are millions of others whose dignity is harmed by these actions who will not have standing to bring their claims to court. People who will be sick because the food they eat will not have been inspected by USDA agents, people who won’t have the benefit of cancer treatments and treatments for opioid addition because researchers have been fired, people whose special education specialists won’t be there to help them get through the school day. And so on.

Attention to dignity does not mean that a government can’t accomplish its policy goals. As the European Court of Human Rights has explained, “In a democratic society, ill-treatment is never an appropriate response to problems facing the authorities.” Whatever this administration’s legitimate policy goals are, it should accomplish them in ways that respect each individual’s humanity.

[1] It may be worth explaining that “Probation” in the sense used by the US government, does not mean that the employees had done anything wrong or that they are of particular concern, but simply that they were new to their current positions. This includes not only people who had joined the federal workforce in the last one or two years, but also people who have worked for the federal government for their entire careers but who had moved to a new position within the federal government in the last year or two; all of these 200,000 people are “probationary,” which simply meant that they had less job security than people who are not probationary, and they therefore could be fired for “poor performance.” It is estimated that 220,000 people may be affected.