The one-sentence email from the White House arrived in Cathy Harris’s inbox at 10:49 p.m. Monday, startling her when she woke up and read it early the next morning.
“On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position on the Merit Systems Protection Board is terminated, effective immediately,” wrote Trent Morse, the deputy director of the presidential personnel office.
Ms. Harris, a Democratic member of the little-known but critical panel that adjudicates federal employee discipline, was the latest official caught up in the Trump administration’s effort to drastically reduce the size of the government work force and reshape it with loyalists.
In his assault on the federal bureaucracy, Mr. Trump has engaged in a multilevel strategy, targeting political appointees like Ms. Harris while instructing agencies to initiate plans for “large scale” reductions in staffing. Trump appointees, many working with Elon Musk’s downsizing initiative, moved quickly to place thousands of federal employees on administrative leave at the American aid agency known as U.S.A.I.D., as well as at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Education Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
But Mr. Trump’s blitz has run into a complicated set of legal roadblocks. In targeting executive branch officials whose positions are supposed to be protected by different restrictions against arbitrary removal, Mr. Trump has defied those legal limits. In a number of cases, the courts have already delivered setbacks to his efforts.
“Many of these systems have developed over decades, and they’re not necessarily designed at one point in time to achieve a particular purpose,” Don Moynihan, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan, said of the different laws protecting federal employees that Mr. Trump has targeted all at once.
Ms. Harris sued the Trump administration to contest her firing, and faces a hearing on Thursday in the case.
The leeway that Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk’s team have to make cuts depends on the positions in question. For example, the Justice Department prosecutors who worked on the federal criminal investigations against Mr. Trump — and who were recently fired — are entitled to civil service protections.
The Trump administration has tried to place thousands of U.S.A.I.D. workers on administrative leave, in what could be a precursor to mass layoffs, and has eyed probationary employees at different federal agencies. Those workers do not have full civil service protections.
At the General Services Administration, which manages the federal real estate portfolio and much of the government’s tech work force, widespread layoffs began on Wednesday, concentrated among probationary hires.
Some of the highest-profile removals have been more surgical efforts that appear designed to neuter independent agencies and offices. In recent days alone, the Trump administration has sought to fire the chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission and the head of the Office of Special Counsel, a government watchdog agency — a move temporarily blocked by a federal judge. Eight former inspectors general who were fired by Mr. Trump last month filed a lawsuit on Wednesday asking a judge to declare their removals illegal and order the government to reinstate them.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump fired another inspector general, Paul K. Martin of U.S.A.I.D., after he published a report on the president’s freeze on foreign aid.
In Ms. Harris, the Trump administration targeted a key gatekeeper of the federal government’s firing authority, a move that could make it easier for the White House to appoint at least one more Republican to the panel and conduct broad layoffs without as much pushback.
“If they don’t respect the rule of law and don’t uphold the rights of the civil service, then we’ll see firings for political partisan reasons,” she said in an interview on Wednesday. “We’ll see corruption. We’ll see grift. All the things that the Merit Systems Protection Board was created to guard against.”
The firing of Ms. Harris echoed other recent moves by Mr. Trump, who effectively crippled other agencies by ousting Democratic members before their terms ended at the National Labor Relations Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.
Ms. Harris had been serving a seven-year term, and argued in her lawsuit that she did not commit offenses that would have made her eligible for firing, such as malfeasance or neglect. Hampton Dellinger, the watchdog official whom Mr. Trump sought to fire while serving a five-year term, made the same argument in court.
In their lawsuit, the fired inspectors general noted that the president must provide Congress with 30 days’ notice and a written explanation of rationale used for a firing.
The law creating the labor board restricts a president’s ability to fire its members at will. But the statutes that created the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission do not explicitly limit a president’s ability to eject its board members for something like misconduct.
David E. Lewis, a Vanderbilt University expert on presidential power, said that the gutting of those panels in particular seemed designed to test the so-called unitary executive theory, which holds that the president wields exclusive control of the executive branch, making laws that give independence to other officials unconstitutional.
The Trump administration has appeared eager to test that view in court, which could allow the Supreme Court to further expand presidential prerogative.
Those sympathetic to that theory, Mr. Lewis said, “believe that the president has these expansive powers, and the way you put that into practice is by saying, ‘I get to fire people.’”
“They don’t mind the message it sends about their efforts to aggressively get control of the administrative state,” he added.
Federal workers who are laid off or suspended typically have the chance to appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board. They are first routed through a system of administrative judges, and appeals are directed to the board for a final decision.
“It’s a federal agency, but it’s effectively a court,” said Nick Bednar, an administrative law expert at the University of Minnesota.
The panel’s decisions can set precedents.
Mr. Bednar said that even if the Trump administration did not succeed in gutting or reshaping the ideological makeup of the panel, its attempts to fire hundreds of thousands of federal workers could grind the group’s work to a halt, clogging its schedule.
“If you’re a federal worker, you’re more likely to just move on,” he said. “You can’t afford to wait for the legal process to be finished.”
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