Federal employees are anxious about losing their jobs after the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration could move forward with firing them, Politico reported Thursday.
The Supreme Court earlier this week lifted a lower court order that temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s plan to fire thousands of federal workers.
Federal workers are hanging their dwindling hopes on the ruling’s suggestion that lower courts could still consider direct challenges to reorganization plans for agencies. But plaintiffs would have to bring more detailed cases quickly to stop layoffs before they happen.
The White House said it plans to begin terminations immediately.
“All of my friends are resigned to the worst,” one National Institutes of Health staffer told Politico.
“F**k it,” one NIH staffer told the outlet. “I’m ready to retire if I can.”
Other staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency waited for news in the Washington headquarters’ basement because of an administration directive to conserve energy meant the building had minimal air conditioning in the city’s summer.
One EPA staffer said the employees were “waiting on pins and needles.”
The the American Federation of Government Employees led the lawsuit alongside cities and counties in California, Illinois, Maryland, Texas and Washington state. They promised to continue fighting but offered no details in their plans.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested that employees might receive a different response if they provide specific examples of unlawful actions.
“The plans themselves are not before this Court, at this stage, and we thus have no occasion to consider whether they can and will be carried out consistent with the constraints of law,” Sotomayor wrote.
The court’s rulling was 8-1 and was unsigned. The ruling said broad challenges were likely to fail. That would upend previously conceived notions of protections for federal employees.
“You are giving a large number of potential federal officers a very clear statement that they might as well go elsewhere,” Paul Light, a former Senate Governmental Affairs Committee staffer and professor emeritus of public service at New York University, told Politico. “The more people who exit, the less ability that you have to respond to significant threats.”
James-Christian Blockwood, president of the National Academy of Public Administration, told Politico that the administration is pursuing worthy goals without prior planning.
“There is broad agreement that reform is needed, but indiscriminately dismissing and disparaging public servants will surely impact government’s ability to retain and recruit the best workforce,” he said.
The White House said the downsizing of the federal workforce is overdue.
“We see the ruling as the Supreme Court reaffirming that the president has complete authority to direct the executive branch, and with that, we will be reducing and simplifying the size of the federal government,” one senior administration official said on Wednesday.
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