The Trump administration can for now continue its mass firings of federal employees, a federal judge ruled on Thursday, rejecting a bid by a group of labor unions to halt President Donald Trump’s dramatic downsizing of the roughly 2.

“I feel like the cruelty is the point, if I am being honest,” a federal worker, terminated on Thursday, told CNN. “There has been so much indication from the new OPM director and Elon Musk and from DOGE that the whole point of this is to scare people away from working in federal government or those who are still there, to want to leave.”