We mentioned on Monday that the Office of Special Counsel had found that six federal civil servants from six separate agencies had been unlawfully terminated from their positions. Now the Merit Systems Protection Board has granted the request to halt those terminations. Needless to say this all sounds very technical and bureaucratic and not at all clear just what it means. I’m kind of there too. I think the best way to put it is that there are agencies within the federal government charged with deciding what kinds of dismissals are and are not okay. The OSC is a sort of finder of fact. They decided these terminations were unlawful. Then they bring it to this Board and ask them to reinstate these people. That’s what just happened.
I asked someone knowledgable on this process what the next steps are. And that person says probably these six people go back to work. And then DOGE probably gets to work on another brainstorming another way to fire them. In other words, my sense of this, is that it’s certainly no final victory, though it’s a significant one. It’s the first shots in a legal and administrative battle over whether DOGE can do all of this. The most logical and legal path to finding another way to let these people go would be a RIF, the federal government’s existing legal framework for layoffs. But there’s a lot about DOGE that suggests that want to move fast and illegal. So we don’t know where that goes.
As I noted earlier this week, the OSC decision strongly implies that the decision applies to many of the federal workers recently fired. And they signaled that they are going to try to process as many of those workers into this category as possible. So it’s analogous though not identical to a court ruling that will apply to other similarly situated people even though it doesn’t touch them directly.
Developing Story, more to come.
