President Donald Trump has taken an axe to the federal workforce, exacting revenge on perceived political enemies, shredding agencies and letting Department of Government Efficiency workers take the reins of the federal bureaucracy.
But the president has also gone after government workers in a much subtler way: functionally shutting down one of the only venues they have to challenge their terminations.
By all accounts, the Merit Systems Protection Board is one of the most obscure corners of the government. A few dozen “lawyer examiners” serve as administrative judges who field complaints from aggrieved federal employees. Whatever happens after a trial can be appealed to a three-person, bipartisan board of political appointees who have a final say.
But on Feb. 10, the White House sent the chair of the board, Cathy Harris, an email saying her position was “terminated, effective immediately.”
“Thank you for your service,” the email read.
Nevermind that Harris’ seven-year term was due to stretch into 2028 and the relevant federal law makes clear that the president can only remove a member “for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
Just two weeks later, one of Harris’ colleagues, Raymond Limon, stepped down from the board, citing the end of his stint, which started halfway through his predecessor’s term. On Friday, Limon told NOTUS that arrangement meant he could have stayed an extra year but, in reality, he was “also facing a firing” if he stayed.
Those two departures have left the MSPB without a quorum, with appeals at a standstill. Thousands of federal workers have effectively been denied their day in the appropriate quasi-judicial court, possibly until Trump’s presidential term is over.
The agency whose explicit mission is to “protect federal merit systems against partisan political and other prohibited personnel practices” is now powerless to stop either.
“This is another example of the administration wantonly breaking stuff,” said Michael Gordon, a former Justice Department lawyer who was fired for prosecuting people who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and now has a pending case before the MSPB. “I liken it to a toddler in a tantrum just walking into a room and just smashing everything around. The stuff they’re smashing is the structure of how American democracy works in practice. And they’re not replacing it with anything.”
Stu Miller, a former administrative judge who oversaw employment challenges for two decades, described the situation as a blanket denial of due process at the very moment people need it most. But he also stressed that government office supervisors who mistreat their employees may feel emboldened to abuse staffers who’ve survived cuts so far.
“I think it’s sad,” Miller said. “Federal employees need an appeal right or you end up with management doing what they feel like it. You can’t bypass the board.”
Created in 1979, the MSPB was one of the government’s post-Watergate reforms. Career civil service workers could only be fired for cause, which included any measure to promote government efficiency; administrative judges and an appeal board would make sure of that.
But the quasi-judicial process stopped working during the first Trump administration, when the MSPB wasn’t fully staffed and his White House took more than two years to simply nominate the required third person. A dire warning from a former Alabama congressman who once ran the board that Trump was “killing” the backstop that “keeps our democracy safe” went ignored. In the end, not a single appeal was heard from when Trump took office in January 2017 until the board was fully staffed again in March 2022.
It took three-quarters of the Biden presidency for the trio to grind through the backlog of 3,793 cases, according to internal data. Working at nearly twice the speed they normally would, according to another internal report, they managed to resolve 99% of the cases by the time Trump returned to office.
But now that Trump fired the board chair, the backlog has returned. When the board quorum disappeared in April, there were 83 petitions awaiting review, according to agency figures. It’s at 315 by the latest count in July.
MSPB’s communications director, Zachary Kurz, told NOTUS that “relatively few cases have been added to a backlog” because “the influx in new filings are still making their way through the [administrative judge] process.” And he noted that appeals typically happen in just a tenth of all cases.
However, internal statistics at MSPB hint at the colossal wave of appeals that’s coming. An average of 89 cases were filed each week across the country in most of December. That number was up to 1,861 the third week of February and 2,225 the following week.
None of the cases can be finalized. Even if workers win before the administrative judge, the Trump administration can simply appeal the decision to the nonexistent board and sentence it to the growing queue.
There’s no telling when the thousands of federal workers now fighting to get their jobs back — or score backpay or correct the record to clear the blemish on their resumes — will see an end to their claims.
That means more aggrieved federal employees will experience the same frustrations as Trinity Ingram-Jones, who was a nurse for years at the Winn Army Community Hospital in Fort Stewart, Georgia, where she handled abuse and sexual assault cases.
The beginning of the end of her federal career came in September 2013, when a coworker brought in a four-year-old boy with a broken right foot and what appeared to be cigarette burn scars on his hands and leg. The boy said his father had burned him “with a white stick.” But when she handed the case off to a social worker and a review committee that didn’t act on it, Ingram-Jones alerted Army medical command brass, who investigated and validated her whistleblowing complaint.
But Ingram-Jones second-guessing her colleagues angered her direct supervisor, who “became hostile with her … for going outside the chain of command.” Her supervisor forbid her from ever seeing other hurt kids at the medical ward who weren’t specifically alleging sexual abuse, according to government records.
Ingram-Jones lost before the MSPB administrative judge but eventually emerged victorious at the board level. It took six years, however, because there wasn’t an MSPB quorum during the first Trump administration. Ingram-Jones’ attorney, Stu Miller, emphasized that these cases can get expensive. Ingram-Jones paid him more than $100,000 out of her own pocket — and it took all that time for the Army to reimburse her for the legal fees she shelled out to him over the years.
The long wait aggrieved federal workers now face is one of the reasons that many employment lawyers who work in this field have either stopped taking on cases headed for the MSPB or put their clients in a position where it becomes too expensive for them to take on the fight, according to several of those attorneys.
“That becomes an economic nonstarter for lawyers,” Pamela Keith, who specializes in these kinds of cases, told NOTUS. “We’re in the ultimate four-year limbo. At a minimum, it’s going to take a new election and a new president to reinstate the MSPB to start moving cases.”
Peter Broida, an attorney who’s had MSPB cases since its start in 1979, conceded that it “is not high on the scoreboard of senators. We’re not talking about the Centers for Disease Control.”
“Nobody cares about it as a practical matter,” Broida said.
But a lawsuit could change things. Last month, Gordon and two other former DOJ employees sued the White House, arguing that Trump had effectively shut down the MSPB, thus violating the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act and posing a constitutional issue that’s ripe for federal judges to step in. The DOJ hasn’t replied yet in court.
One former Jan. 6 prosecutor, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said this boiling anger from ex-employees isn’t about the money. Crying on the phone, this person described the pain of having to explain to their grade-school-aged child that they were fired for “trying to hold people accountable.”
“My kid looked at me and said, ‘Well, that person sounds like a bully.’ And I want to teach my kids you stand up to bullies,” they said, fighting back tears. “No one is in this for the money. We’re not trying to take the government for all it has. We’re all in it because we think it’s the right thing to do.”