# Valentine's Day Massacre (2025) The **Valentine's Day Massacre** is the name fired federal workers and the press gave to the mass dismissal of probationary federal employees that peaked on Thursday and Friday, **February 13–14, 2025**. Over a few days, agencies across the government fired roughly **25,000** workers who were still in their trial period, most of them with a form letter saying their performance did not justify keeping them. A federal judge later found that the [[OPM]], the government's personnel office, had decided who would be fired and when, that the performance explanation was a pretext, and that the directive was unlawful. By then the Supreme Court had already blocked an order to rehire them, and the judge declined to order reinstatement. The workers got corrected personnel files and a letter. They did not get their jobs back. ## Why probationers were first Most new federal hires serve a [[Probationary Period]], usually one or two years, before they gain full civil-service protection. During that window an agency can remove them with a short written notice, and in most cases they cannot appeal to the [[Merit Systems Protection Board]] at all. That made probationers the cheapest cut available. Firing tenured employees in large numbers requires a [[Reduction in Force]], a formal process with advance notice, retention rankings and appeal rights. Firing probationers one by one "for performance" requires almost none of that. As of March 2024, the most recent figure OPM had published at the time, about 220,000 federal workers had been on the job less than a year. ## How it unfolded - **January 20, 2025.** On the first day of the [[Second Trump Administration]], OPM sent agencies a memo telling them to list every employee on probation and "promptly determine" whether each should be kept. - **January 28.** OPM's "Fork in the Road" email offered the [[Deferred Resignation Program]], the administration's first attempt to shrink the workforce voluntarily. - **February 11.** President [[Donald Trump]] signed [[Executive Order 14210]], directing agencies to prepare "large-scale reductions in force" and to clear new hiring with [[DOGE]]. - **February 13.** OPM told agencies to fire nearly all probationary employees who lacked civil-service protection. The [[Department of Veterans Affairs]] announced that day that it had dismissed more than 1,000 employees. At the [[Department of Energy]], as many as 350 staff of the National Nuclear Security Administration, the office that maintains the nuclear weapons stockpile, were fired and found themselves locked out of their offices the next morning. - **February 14.** OPM, run by acting director [[Charles Ezell]], emailed agency personnel chiefs asking them to separate every probationer not identified as "mission-critical" by the end of the day on Monday, February 17. A template termination letter was attached. - **The following days.** The [[United States Forest Service]] cut about 2,000 non-firefighting probationers by the Agriculture Department's count, and about 3,400 by the federal employees' union's count, close to a tenth of its workforce. The [[National Park Service]] fired at least 1,000. Other cuts hit agencies from the [[Department of Education]] and the [[CFPB]] to science and public-health offices. The nuclear firings were the first to be reversed. Late on February 14 the agency's acting head rescinded the dismissals for all but 28 of those let go, amid criticism from lawmakers and arms-control experts. The Energy Department had first described the cuts as fewer than 50 administrative and clerical staff. ## The name The nickname came from the workers themselves. A National Park Service employee fired that week called it the "Valentine's Day massacre" in an interview with ABC News, and commentators picked it up, among them a *Rolling Stone* column on the veterans swept up in the cuts. It borrows the name of the 1929 gangland killing in Chicago. ## The form letter The termination notices followed OPM's template. Rather than citing the government's need to cut staff, which would have triggered the rules for a reduction in force, they told each employee that "the Agency finds that you are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and skills do not fit the Agency's current needs." The unions argued from the start that the performance language was false. On February 27, Judge [[William Alsup]] of the federal court in San Francisco said from the bench that OPM had no power to order the firings: "The agency has no authority to tell any other agency in the U.S. government who it can hire and fire, period." He rejected the government's claim that OPM had merely asked agencies to act. On March 4, OPM revised its January memo to add that it was not directing agencies to take any specific action against probationary employees and that each agency kept its own decision-making authority. ## In the courts Three challenges moved at once. - **[[OPM v. AFGE]].** A coalition led by the [[AFGE]] and other unions, joined by nonprofit groups, sued in San Francisco. Alsup issued a temporary restraining order on February 27, and on March 13 ordered six departments to offer reinstatement: Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Defense, Energy, the Interior and the Treasury. On **April 8, 2025**, the Supreme Court stayed that order in an unsigned ruling covering about 16,000 workers. It held that the nonprofit plaintiffs, on whose claims the order rested, had not shown standing to sue, and it said nothing about whether the firings were legal. Justices Sotomayor and Jackson would have denied the stay. - **[[Maryland v. United States Department of Agriculture]].** Nineteen states and the District of Columbia sued in Maryland, arguing that the firings were a reduction in force in all but name and that the government had skipped the advance notice states are owed so they can prepare for mass layoffs. Judge James Bredar agreed and ordered reinstatement at 18 agencies. On April 9, one day after the Supreme Court's ruling, a divided panel of the Fourth Circuit stayed his order, finding the government likely to show the district court lacked jurisdiction. - **The civil-service watchdogs.** At the request of the [[Office of Special Counsel]], then led by [[Hampton Dellinger]], the Merit Systems Protection Board on March 5 ordered the Agriculture Department to reinstate nearly 6,000 fired probationers for 45 days while the firings were investigated. Reinstated workers were often put on paid administrative leave rather than returned to work. Once the stays came down, several agencies fired many of them again. On **September 12, 2025**, Alsup issued his final ruling. He found that OPM had directed the agencies "to fire under false pretense," that "OPM decided who to fire" and "OPM decided when to fire," and that the directive was unlawful. He called the government's account of the decisions a sham. But he declined to order anyone rehired, writing that too much time had passed and that many of the workers had moved on. Instead he ordered the covered agencies to correct each worker's personnel file and, by November 14, to send every affected employee a letter stating that they had not been fired for performance. ## What came after The probationary firings were the opening wave. Formal reductions in force followed under Executive Order 14210, and on July 8, 2025, in [[Trump v. AFGE]], the Supreme Court let that order and the layoff planning behind it go forward. In 2026 OPM moved appeals by fired probationers out of the Merit Systems Protection Board and into OPM itself, so the agency whose directive a court found unlawful now decides the appeals. ## Why it matters The episode showed how much of the civil service's protection lives in procedure rather than in outcomes. The government lost the legal argument over the firings and won the fight anyway: emergency stays kept the workers out while the cases ran, and by the time a court ruled on the merits, the remedy left was a letter. The [[Saturday Night Massacre]] of 1973 forced the President to back down within weeks and accept a new special prosecutor. This one ended with the jobs gone. It also showed where the leverage sat. A personnel office that was never designed to check the President, and has no power of its own to fire anyone outside its walls, turned out to be the instrument that set the pace for 25,000 terminations in a week. ## Connections - [[Probationary Period]] · [[Reduction in Force]] · [[Deferred Resignation Program]] · [[Executive Order 14210]] - [[OPM]] · [[Charles Ezell]] · [[Merit Systems Protection Board]] · [[Office of Special Counsel]] · [[Hampton Dellinger]] · [[AFGE]] - [[OPM v. AFGE]] · [[Maryland v. United States Department of Agriculture]] · [[Trump v. AFGE]] - [[DOGE]] · [[Elon Musk]] · [[DOGE and Government Dismantling Timeline]] · [[DOGE and Federal Workforce]] - [[How a Federal Employee Is Fired]] · [[How a Federal Agency Is Dismantled]]