Fired federal workers file class action lawsuit naming HHS, DOGE

Employees fired from federal healthcare agencies claim their termination notices contained inaccurate information—including bogus performance ratings—that was cited as cause for dismissal. The coalition has filed a class-action lawsuit against the government, naming the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the complaint. 

According to the plaintiffs, when probationary workers were released during DOGE’s purge of federal government workers, their notices listed poor performance as a justification, despite many of the employees having been only recently recognized with internal awards for their exceptionalism. 

Others claim the notices themselves had listed reasons for terminations not in the employee records, citing incidents that had no relationship to reality. Some contained erroneous information about the agencies and subdivisions themselves, the lawsuit claims.  In many cases, “the error-ridden data prevented defendants from understanding even the basic composition of HHS offices.“

“Second, these inaccurate and incomplete records fed directly into agency retention registers—the formal standings that rank employees against each other—making it less likely that plaintiffs caught up in the reduction of force would be retained or offered favorable reassignment,” they added. 

At the heart of the complaint is DOGE’s access to government record systems and knowledge of internal employee databases. In order to obtain a complete work and performance history on an individual, the fired employees argue data would need to be accumulated from multiple locations. 

DOGE would potentially need to have access to a dozen database—and have working knowledge of how information was stored in them, plaintiffs said. If not, then any assessment of employees' work history would be incomplete. 

The fired workers argue that, given how employee data is stored in disparate locations, an assessment of the accuracy of any report is necessary for the performance-based termination process—a step they claim was likely missing here, given the inaccuracies found in the termination notices. 

“[None] of these systems communicate with each other. Some systems are updated more than others,” the lawsuit reads. “Some systems receive corrections faster than others. Nearly all have inaccuracies that are slowly compounded.”

While HHS did grant DOGE access to databases on almost all federal workers, the speed by which reductions in force were conducted make it nearly impossible to account for clerical errors, the lawsuit contends.