From Wash Post--21 states sue Trump admin--over illegal firings--

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/03/07/lawsuit-trump-federal-workers/

The other states joining the lawsuit include Minnesota, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai’i, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin, as well as the District of Columbia.

The

District and Maryland are among the most heavily impacted by the firings. Combined, they are home to nearly 366,000 federal workers, according to federal data compiled by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments regional group. The Republican attorney general of Virginia, where another roughly 321,500 federal employees live, did not join the lawsuit.

In court documents, the Democratic attorneys general described a host of administrative, public health and fiscal challenges onset by the firings, including remarkable upticks in unemployment claims.

In Maryland, more than 800 former federal employees have applied for unemployment benefits since Trump took office, according to data from the state’s Labor Department. During the same time period last year, Maryland received 189 unemployment claims from federal workers.

The state of Illinois has experienced a similar influx, with the same number of former federal workers filing for unemployment benefits in the first three months of 2025 as it did for all of 2024.

But states’ abilities to process those unemployment claims has been complicated by what the lawsuit claims is a messy, inconsistent and non-transparent firing process — one further exacerbated, the states allege, by the potential illegality of the probationary worker terminations.