The Trump administration’s personnel director denied allegations he unlawfully orchestrated the firing of tens of thousands of federal probationary employees, including USDA research scientists.

Charles Ezell, acting director of the Office of Personnel Management, said in a court filing Feb. 26 that individual agencies decided which employees to dismiss.  “Agencies took their own actions to terminate employees the agencies did not wish to retain,” he stated.

Ezell, a Trump appointee, responded to claims by the American Federation of Government Employees and others that he and his office ordered the mass firings that occurred between Feb. 12 and 14.

Workers still on probation in more than 30 agencies received standardized emails telling them they were fired based on their performance, according to a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for Northern California. The emails did not elaborate on a worker’s purported shortcomings.

The agencies include USDA, Environmental Protection Agency, Bureau of Reclamation, Bureau of Land Management, and Fish and Wildlife Service. The fired workers included scientists conducting agricultural, forestry and aquaculture research in the Northwest.

The lawsuit seeks to have the workers reinstated. The personnel office has no authority to hire or fire federal workers, especially by falsely accusing them of poor performance, the plaintiffs claim.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup on Feb. 25 told U.S. attorneys to explain the personnel office’s role in the firings and how an agency can lawfully fire a probationary employee for “performance” if the worker’s performance was satisfactory.

The government’s response and Ezell’s declaration shifted responsibility for the firings to individual agencies. Ezell instructed agencies Jan. 20 to compile a list of probationary employees and decide which ones they wanted to keep.

“Agencies were responsible for reviewing probationers’ performance, and agencies were responsible for deciding which probationary employees to keep and terminate,” Ezell stated.

Agencies are not required to keep all workers who are performing satisfactorily and could choose to only retain the highest-performing employees, he said.

The USDA did not respond to questions about how many probationary employees it fired, how many it retained or whether it has rehired any. Several scientists told the Capital Press they were fired from the USDA-Agricultural Research Service via a form email from USDA human resources director Willis Collie.

The other plaintiffs include the Western Watersheds Project, an environmental group that seeks to influence public lands management in the West. The group’s “primary focus is on the negative impact of livestock grazing,” according to the lawsuit.

The group “faces imminent harm” because the firing of federal employees “is likely to cause further degradation of public lands and wildlife,” the group claimed.

U.S. attorneys said the plaintiffs haven’t produced any evidence the firing of federal employees has disrupted critical government services.