A U.S. appeals court on Friday refused to pause a judge's ruling requiring the Trump administration to reinstate 25,000 workers at 18 federal agencies who lost their jobs as part of the Republican president's purge of the federal workforce.

A panel of the Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said there was no reason to pause the decision because the judge in Baltimore, Maryland is expected to decide next week whether to extend it further, in a lawsuit brought by 19 Democrat-led states and Washington, D.C....

Two US judges have ordered several federal government agencies to reinstate the jobs of probationary employees fired en masse by the Trump administration last month.

In California, District Judge William Alsup called the sacking of these employees part of a "sham" strategy that aimed to circumvent proper procedures for reducing the federal workforce.

His order - which was followed by another from Maryland - applies to thousands of probationary workers who were fired at a range of departments, including defence, energy, treasury, and veterans affairs.

A U.S. federal judge on Thursday ordered six federal agencies to rehire thousands of probationary workers fired as part of Donald Trump’s push to slash the size and scope of government.

The ruling is the latest judicial setback for the administration, coming on the heels of a string of legal defeats that nevertheless seem not to have slowed the pace of change.

A federal judge in San Francisco ordered President Donald Trump’s administration to rehire thousands, if not tens of thousands, of probationary workers let go in mass firings across multiple agencies, blasting their tactics Thursday as he slowed the new president’s dramatic downsizing of the federal government.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup said that the terminations were directed by the Office of Personnel Management and its acting director, Charles Ezell, who lacked the authority to do so.

The Department of Education is laying off about 50 percent of its workforce starting this week as President Donald Trump prepares to formally abolish the agency through a planned executive order.

The job cuts affect roughly 1,300 career employees, who were told to turn in government property and clean out their desks before leaving. Nearly 600 employees who voluntarily resigned or retired are included in the reduction-in-force action. The mass layoffs were announced on Tuesday evening.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon affirmed late Tuesday that mass layoffs are the first step toward shuttering the Education Department — a longtime goal of President Trump’s since his time on the campaign trail.

“Actually, it is, because that was the president’s mandate,” McMahon told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham on Tuesday. “His directive to me, clearly, is to shut down the Department of Education, which we know we’ll have to work with Congress, you know, to get that accomplished.”

 The Education Department’s civil rights branch is losing nearly half its staff in the Trump administration’s layoffs, effectively gutting an office that already faced a backlog of thousands of complaints from students and families across the nation.

The Internal Revenue Service reportedly notified staff that over 6,000 will be let go before week's end.

The decision follows President Donald Trump's directive to slash probationary workers across the federal government.

The IRS started laying off employees on Thursday, just as tax season kicks into high gear.

Why it matters: The terminations, reportedly of 6,000 relatively new workers at the agency, are part of President Trump's broader purge of the federal workforce.

A tearful executive at the U.S. Internal Revenue Service told staffers on Thursday that about 6,000 employees would be fired, a person familiar with the matter said, in a move that would eliminate roughly 6% of the agency's workforce in the midst of the busy tax-filing season.

The cuts are part of President Donald Trump's sweeping downsizing effort that has targeted bank regulators, forest workers, rocket scientists and tens of thousands of other government employees. The effort is being led by tech billionaire Elon Musk, Trump's biggest campaign donor.