President-elect Donald Trump may be able to fire any federal employee he wants after he is inaugurated, and he has President Joe Biden to thank for it.
That is the word from former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, who, along with Kellyanne Conway and Russ Vought, was appointed to the visitor boards for the Navy, the Air Force, and Army academies for three-year terms during Trump’s final days in his first term, but was immediately fired by Biden after he took office.
Spicer and Vought filed a lawsuit claiming that the president could not fire them, but they were defeated in court when the judge said in his decision that “[t]he Supreme Court has consistently held that ‘the power of removal from office is incident to the power of appointment’ ‘absent a specific provision to the contrary.’”
“What no one ever understood was this was not about actually getting back on the board, because my term had been expired for months,” the former press secretary said in an interview with The Washington Examiner last week.
“It was forcing them to argue in the affirmative that they had the ultimate authority to fire anybody at any time, which they did. And the court accepted that. So the Biden administration is now on record in court, and the court agreed that the president had absolute authority to fire anyone he wants,” Spicer continued.
“The whole point is now, on day one, President Trump can go in and fire everyone and say it was the Biden folks who told us that we could do this,” he said.
The president-elect has said he will challenge a deal that the Social Security Administration made with its union that allowed many workers to work from home until 2029.
In an interview with CBS News, Trump said, “It was like a gift to a union, and we’re going to obviously be in court to stop it.”
“If people don’t come back to work, come back into the office, they’re going to be dismissed,” he said.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are set to head the advisory board named the Department of Government Efficiency, penned an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal where they said federal employees will have to come back to work in their offices.
“Conventional wisdom holds that statutory civil-service protections stop the president or even his political appointees from firing federal workers. The purpose of these protections is to protect employees from political retaliation. But the statute allows for ‘reductions in force’ that don’t target specific employees. The statute further empowers the president to ‘prescribe rules governing the competitive service.’ That power is broad. Previous presidents have used it to amend the civil service rules by executive order, and the Supreme Court has held—in Franklin v. Massachusetts (1992) and Collins v. Yellen (2021) that they weren’t constrained by the Administrative Procedures Act when they did so,” the pair said.
“With this authority, Mr. Trump can implement any number of “rules governing the competitive service” that would curtail administrative overgrowth, from large-scale firings to relocation of federal agencies out of the Washington area. Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome: If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home,” they said.
Some of those federal workers are now dreading the coming Trump administration, CNN reported.
“I would say there is a general feeling of dread among everyone,” an Energy Department employee said to CNN.
That is because the president-elect wants to use a tool known as “Schedule F,” which was part of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 that exempts workers “whose position has been determined to be of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character” from holding civil service protections, in order to cut political appointees.
“The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail,” Karoline Leavitt, the spokeswoman for the Trump transition said. “He will deliver.”
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