The former watchdog for federal workers said Thursday that he intends to drop his bid for the courts to reinstate him after the Trump administration fired him without cause last month, signaling the end to the most prominent fight so far about Trump’s effort to reshape the executive branch.
Hampton Dellinger, who was the head of the Office of Special Counsel until a court ruling Wednesday, said in a statement he would drop his case after facing the “long” odds to be reinstated by the Supreme Court.
A unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Wednesday paused a lower court ruling that reinstated Dellinger, effectively allowing President Donald Trump to fire Dellinger while the case runs its course.
Dellinger said that court ruling meant that at least for several months the office would be headed by someone “totally beholden” to Trump. Dellinger said the decision allowing his firing “immediately erases” the independence that Congress meant to provide when creating an independent watchdog for federal employees within the executive branch who could only be fired for cause.
“Meanwhile, the harm to the agency and those who rely on it caused by a Special Counsel who is not independent could be immediate, grievous, and, I fear, uncorrectable,” Dellinger said.
The order allowing Dellinger’s removal came after the Trump administration, which contends the law unconstitutionally infringes on the power of the president, appealed an order from Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia finding that Trump violated the law in firing Dellinger.
The order stated that the D.C. Circuit would soon issue an opinion justifying the firing, but that has not been released as of Thursday afternoon.
Dellinger had challenged his firing last month, arguing that it violated the law Congress passed setting up his office in the 1970s. That law, which created the Office of Special Counsel as part of a broader overhaul of federal worker rules, stated that the Senate-confirmed office was also shielded the special counsel from being fired except for cause.
Prior to the Circuit Court order allowing Dellinger’s firing, he took multiple actions to counter Trump’s mass firings of federal workers. Earlier this week the Merit Systems Protection Board paused for 45 days the firings of thousands of probationary employees at the Agriculture Department.
The Trump administration is currently locked in litigation over the firing of more than a dozen other executive officials with firing protections, including inspectors general as well as members of the MSPB and the National Labor Relations Board.
The Trump administration has argued that the president is allowed to fire any official in the executive branch and has said it intends to challenge Supreme Court precedents that protect officials from being fired without cause.
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