President Donald Trump's administration says it is moving to reinstate more than 24,000 probationary workers it fired as part of its efforts to slash the size of the federal workforce, court documents filed Monday show.
Officials at 18 departments and agencies submitted signed declarations detailing their teams' efforts to rehire the fired workers in order to comply with court orders. Last week two federal judges ordered the administration to temporarily reinstate thousands of probationary workers who were fired.
The documents are the first full accounting of how many people lost their jobs in the Trump administration's mass firings of probationary workers, who have typically held their positions for less than two years and don't have full civil service protections.
But many of the employees being reinstated won't be getting right back to work; instead, they'll be placed on administrative leave, including at the Education Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, two agencies that have been targeted for dismantling, and a number of other major federal departments.