Huh. It turns out Musk and Trump can’t just fire probationary employees just by saying yer fiyered.

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Office of Personnel Management to rescind earlier instructions telling federal agencies to “promptly determine whether these employees should be retained at the agency.”

The directions, communicated in a Jan. 20 memo and Feb. 14 internal email, are “illegal” and “should be stopped, rescinded,” Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California said from the bench.

The ruling does not reinstate dismissed employees.

“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 within another agency,” Alsup said Thursday night. “It can hire its own employees, yes. Can fire them. But it cannot order or direct some other agency to do so.”

Huh. I wonder why no one bothered to look into that first. Seems kind of sloppy.

Alsup called probationary employees “the lifeblood of our government.”

“They come in at the low level and they work their way up, and that’s how we renew ourselves and reinvent ourselves,” he said.

But there are too many. Trump says so.