Thank the Supreme Court for the Evisceration of the Federal Workforce

Since January, I have interviewed numerous federal workers whose jobs have been hanging in the balance following the Department of Government Efficiency’s early purges and the follow-up reductions-in-force plans ordered by individual agencies and departments.

Watching these mass firings unfold, it’s been clear the commissars and tech bros in charge of dismantling government functions are not working to some master plan of efficiency. Rather, they have been working to arbitrary quotas set by the Trump team that dictate what random percentages of the workforce should be let go, and hewing to ideological mandates about shrinking government no matter what the collateral damage may be. They have fired people in deliberately cruel and traumatizing ways, not for doing bad work but for work that reveals inconvenient truths—that, say, climate change is real and has tangible consequences; that discrimination exists in the education system and shrinks the opportunities available to children in low-income communities and to students of color; that infectious diseases spread particularly quickly when public health systems are dilapidated and inequality is rampant.

In executing these layoffs, Trump’s administration has left America critically exposed, with too few federal first responders, too few meteorologists, too few air traffic controllers, too few infectious disease detectors, too few workplace safety monitors, and too few employees to monitor violations of schoolchildren’s civil rights. The deadly flooding in Texas offered a harbinger of what happens when there are not enough FEMA staffers to manage a deluge of calls and requests for assistance. The Houston Chronicle compared FEMA’s response to the Texas flooding to the failures following Hurricane Katrina. And, given the scale of cuts, this is likely only the first act in a long, and ugly, passion play.

Time after time, lower courts have ruled against the firings, finding them to be capricious and a violation of long-established practices that give Congress the power to make and unmake agencies and departments, as well as to delegate functions and allocate funding to those agencies and departments. For months now, in consequence, workers whom the Trump administration has tried to fire have continued to receive their paychecks. Put simply, judges have come to the commonsense conclusion that agencies with virtually no workers would be unable to perform their congressionally mandated roles.

Now the majority on the Supreme Court has upended those commonsense rulings and allowed mass firings to proceed apace. The first blow came just over a week ago, when the court issued an unsigned ruling allowing wholesale firings across the federal government to resume. The second came earlier this week, when the court specifically permitted the gutting of the Department of Education, eviscerating a half-century-old, congressionally created department, and doing so with absolutely no input from Congress.

The “conservative” justices arrived at these startling decisions not on the merits of the government’s legal arguments but by buying into the administration’s preposterous position that they should allow the firings to proceed “temporarily” while the legal proceedings around the reduction-in-force orders are playing out. This is, of course, an absurdity.

In the case of the Education Department, what the ruling means is that decades of expertise on enforcing civil rights law, on distributing grants and loans to low-income school districts and to students, and on making schools more accessible to children with a range of learning disabilities can be cast aside “temporarily” while the lawsuits continue. What is left unsaid is that if the government ultimately loses in those lawsuits, the damage will have already been done; the work of those fired workers will have been unraveled, and decades of efforts to make education fairer and more accessible will have been destroyed.

It’s hard to imagine thousands of highly skilled fired workers simply hanging around for months on the off chance that the courts will eventually deliver a ruling in their favor. They will find other jobs and take their skills and knowledge elsewhere. Whatever the courts decide, the DOE will thus have been left eviscerated. And so, Trump wins even if he technically loses.

The “conservative” justices have, in the face of numerous lower-court rulings to the contrary, given the felon president yet another win-win scenario.