WASHINGTON — Erin Cagney was supposed to hear 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.
Cagney finally learned her fate 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 Wednesday. “I don’t want to be on administrative leave, in limbo, for some unknown duration of time.”
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, 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 Donald Trump.
“I worry that that means they’re just planning to put us in a wider layoff in the future,” 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 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 Trump took office. The Energy Department fired 555 probationary employees in February, Trznadel wrote.
Rehiring the employees, she wrote, means filling out paperwork, issuing new security badges and government equipment and restoring security clearances. Trznadel said all 555 employees had been reinstated by the end of the day Monday and then placed on administrative leave.
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