For the second time in as many days, a higher court has paused a judicial ruling that ordered the reinstatement of federal employees who were fired en masse, leaving thousands of probationary workers vulnerable once again to potential termination.

In a 2-1 ruling Wednesday, a three-judge panel of the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily set aside a Maryland judge’s injunction that had ordered agencies to reinstate employees in 19 states and the District of Columbia. The majority found the government was likely to succeed in proving that the Maryland district court had no jurisdiction over the states’ claims that federal agencies had engaged in an illegal Reduction in Force (RIF).

The panel’s ruling comes one day after the Supreme Court issued a separate stay that had a similar effect on a California court’s ruling that had also ordered the reinstatement of some agencies’ fired probationary workers. In that case, the high court, in an unsigned order Tuesday, also put the preliminary injunction on hold while claims of illegal firing work their way through the appeals process.

In the Maryland case, Judge DeAndrea Gist Benjamin said she would have allowed the preliminary injunction that had been protecting affected probationary workers from termination to stay in place.

“The states clearly have standing to challenge the process by which the government has engaged in mass firings,” she wrote in a dissent. “I see no reason to stay the district court’s preliminary injunction pending its appeal.”

Although the court orders that had barred agencies from large scale terminations of probationary workers are now on hold, this week’s rulings are not the end in either the Maryland case or the California one.

In the Maryland case, which alleges the government engaged in what amounted to RIFs without giving proper notice to the states, the Fourth Circuit has set an expedited schedule to hear full arguments on whether the preliminary injunction was appropriate, and the district court has yet to rule on the full merits of the case.

And in California, the judge is considering whether to issue another preliminary injunction that could withstand the ruling the Supreme Court issued Tuesday. In that order, the justices found that the outside organizations harmed by the mass firings didn’t have standing to sue, but explicitly left open the possibility that other plaintiffs, including federal unions, could win an injunction of their own.

In a San Francisco courtroom Wednesday, Judge William Alsup heard arguments over whether unions had standing to sue and win another injunction. However, he postponed issuing a ruling until attorneys in the case provide more information, including data about how many employees were affected by the mass terminations, their relationships with the union plaintiffs, and possible evidence that would show that agencies’ firing decisions were made at the behest of the Office of Personnel Management.