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whistleblowers
Judge Reinstates Federal Worker Appeals Board Chair Fired by Trump
The court found that Cathy Harris "is likely to show her termination as a member of the MSPB was unlawful."
Feb 18, 2025
In a case that could ultimately proceed to the U.S. Supreme Court as President Donald Trump attempts to take control of independent agencies across the government, a judge on Tuesday reinstated the chair of a board that hears appeals from federal employees after the president fired her last week.
U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras ruled that Cathy Harris must be reinstated as chair of the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), an independent agency that reviews significant actions of the Office of Personnel Management, where Trump's billionaire backer, tech mogul Elon Musk, has recently seized troves of sensitive data.
Harris was serving a term that is not scheduled to end until March 2028.
The president is only allowed to remove leaders from the MSPB in cases of "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office," and Harris' lawyer argued that Trump, who fired the board chair in a one-sentence email from the Presidential Personnel Office, did not make the case that Harris needed to be fired.
Contreras wrote in his ruling granting Harris a temporary restraining order that the MSPB "falls within the scope of Humphrey's Executor," a 1935 Supreme Court ruling that established the precedent that Congress can require the president to show cause before firing board members at independent agencies.
"Congress has the power to specify that members of the MSPB may serve for a term of years, with the president empowered to remove those members only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office," Contreras wrote.
"The president did not indicate that any of these reasons drove his decision to terminate Harris," he continued. "The court thus concludes that Harris has demonstrated that she is likely to show her termination as a member of the MSPB was unlawful."
A federal judge last week also blocked Trump from firing Hampton Dellinger, head of the Office of the Special Counsel (OSC), which protects whistleblowers.
If the cases make their way to the Supreme Court, the court's right-wing majority could rule in favor of expanding presidential powers related to dismissing the heads of watchdog agencies.
Since the MSPB hears appeals from federal workers, Harris' reinstatement is also "particularly noteworthy given the recent mass firings of [federal employees] across government," said Eric Katz of Government Executive.
After granting Harris a temporary restraining order, Contreras ordered Harris to submit a motion for a preliminary injunction within five days and scheduled a hearing on the matter for March 3.
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New Lawsuit Reveals Trump Quietly Fired Head of Office That Protects Whistleblowers
"This illegal firing undermines the office that investigates whistleblower disclosures of wrongdoing and enforces the law meant to keep partisan politics out of the federal workforce," wrote one watchdog group.
Feb 10, 2025
Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger, the head of an independent federal agency that protects whistleblowers, filed a lawsuit in federal court Monday alleging that U.S. President Donald Trump's "purported" dismissal of him via email on Friday is unlawful and ignores for cause removal protections that Dellinger is entitled to.
Dellinger is one of a number of officials at independent federal agencies that Trump has moved to fire in recent weeks.
According to the complaint, Dellinger received an email from Sergio Gor, director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, on February 7, which read: "On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as special counsel of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service[.]"
The complaint lists six defendants, including Gor, Trump, acting Special Counsel of the Office of Special Counsel (OSC) Karen Gorman ("upon the purported removal" of Dellinger, according to the complaint), Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Chief Operating Officer of the OSC Karl Kanmann, and Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought.
Dellinger is requesting that the court declare his firing unlawful and affirm that he is the head of the OSC.
The filing also asks the court to order that "Bessent, Gor, Kammann, and Vought may not place an acting special counsel in plaintiff Hampton Dellinger's position, or otherwise recognize any other person as special counsel or as the agency head of the Office of Special Counsel."
The watchdog group Project on Government Oversight called the move against Dellinger "illegal" and wrote on X on Monday that it "undermines the office that investigates whistleblower disclosures of wrongdoing and enforces the law meant to keep partisan politics out of the federal workforce."
The OSC is both an investigative and prosecutorial agency whose main mission is to protect federal employees from "prohibited personnel practices"—in particular reprisals for whistleblowing. The office is different from the "special counsels" that the U.S. Department of Justice may appoint to prosecute cases in instances where they deem there may be a conflict of interest.
Dellinger was nominated to be the special counsel of the OSC by then-President Joe Biden in 2023 and was confirmed by the Senate to a five-year term that was set to expire in 2029.
The complaint cites federal statute, which mandates that "the special counsel may be removed by the president only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." Dellinger's legal counsel argues that the email from Gor does not accuse Dellinger of "any inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance... nor could it."
In late January, Trump fired National Labor Relations Board Member Gwynne Wilcox, who has since sued over her dismissal, as well as two Democratic members of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Federal Election Commission Commissioner and Chair Ellen Weintraub also said that Trump tried to remove her improperly.
The Trump administration also purged over a dozen inspectors generals who perform oversight duties at various federal agencies.
The filing also argues that the removal of these sorts of civil servants makes the work of the OSC all the more important.
"Congress authorized the OSC with a crucial investigative and oversight role to protect the integrity of the civil service in circumstances such as these," wrote Dellinger's lawyers.
"The recent spate of terminations of protected civil service employees under the new presidential administration has created controversies, both about the lawfulness of these actions and about potential retaliation against whistleblowers," they added.
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Why Congress Must Extend Whistleblower Protections to Government Contractors
If the Expanding Whistleblower Protections for Contractors Act is passed, more contractors could feel empowered to stand up for what is right with crucial information.
Nov 15, 2024
With the recent presidential election, violence in the Middle East, and intense natural disasters prominent in the current news cycle, it’s understandable that major legislation is getting overlooked. However, there is one bill in particular that the public should keep its eyes on due to its potential impact on all aspects of our politics, like government accountability, immigration, and even public health: S. 1524, the Expanding Whistleblower Protections for Contractors Act.
Although there is existing legislation aimed at protecting government contractors, it is lackluster at best. Contractors can still face roadblocks on the way to truth-telling, such as limited jury trials, blacklisting, retaliation, and even a dearth of protections for refusing to violate the law. However, the Expanding Whistleblower Protections for Contractors Act increases protections for jobs funded by taxpayer dollars and closes these loopholes for federal contractors to build greater transparency in our government.
To find a case study on the importance of this legislation, one needs to look no further than the February 3, 2023 Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, which sent forever chemicals and combustible materials, such as vinyl chloride (a toxic flammable gas), across the community and temporarily displaced 1,500 to 2,000 people. Three days later, authorities burned 116,000 gallons of vinyl chloride and other highly toxic chemicals from five tankers, sending a dense black toxic cloud over the entire region that could be seen from space. It was recently determined that the toxic fallout of materials from the derailment and burn have been detected in 16 states.
Less than a day after the derailment, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) failed to follow procedures to fly its Airborne Spectral Photometric Environmental Collection Technology (ASPECT) plane for data collection of chemical levels in the area. Had it done so, the agency could have determined that the chemicals in the unexploded tanks were cooling and no longer posed a threat of explosion, making the so-called “control burn” unnecessary and its fallout avoidable. In fact, the ASPECT plane remained grounded for five days until the toxic cloud had dissipated. In the aftermath of the derailment, Dr. Robert Kroutil, an EPA contractor with Kalman & Company and a key developer in the ASPECT program, was concerned about the inordinate and unnecessary delays.
With improved and stronger whistleblower protections, Dr. Kroutil would most likely not have been forced into retirement because of the threats. He could have stood his ground while still on the job.
When he finally received data to analyze, he was shocked that the plane only collected data for seven minutes when more typical flights would collect hundreds of minutes of data. He also learned that the sensors were turned off when the plane flew over creeks, waterways, and the crash site itself. He and his fellow scientists reported that the presence of contamination was inconclusive. A few weeks later, the EPA used this report to conclude that the data collection was a success, and it was safe for residents to return to their homes when in fact the reason the results were inconclusive was because the EPA failed to collect the necessary data. Dr. Kroutil was so upset about what was happening, he filed a Freedom of Information request for documents such as back-dated flight plans. When he was threatened with termination unless he withdrew his requests, he decided to retire and go public with his revelations. He had no faith in the current, inadequate legal protections. The EPA retaliated by calling his claims “false” within minutes of hearing about them. The Office of Inspector General has determined, however, that a full investigation of his concerns is warranted, supported by many other whistleblowers.
With improved and stronger whistleblower protections, Dr. Kroutil would most likely not have been forced into retirement because of the threats. He could have stood his ground while still on the job. Unfortunately, similar events have already occurred surrounding the failure to deploy the ASPECT aircraft.
Since his disclosure of EPA’s mismanagement, two train derailments in Illinois and North Dakota have resulted in the spill of hazardous chemicals and mirror problems with the response to the derailment in East Palestine. In both incidents, the EPA failed to deploy its ASPECT chemical sensing aircraft to collect data. Instead, ASPECT at the time of the derailments was performing a nonemergency assessment near Buffalo, New York, collecting data on a legacy contamination issue from World War II.
With thousands of government contractors working tough jobs for our protection—from ensuring our food is safe to eat and defending us from foreign attacks to mitigating the impact of disasters like the derailment in East Palestine—it’s time we start protecting them too. The laws aimed at allowing contractors to speak truth to power must be modernized and repaired to make whistleblowers less vulnerable to retaliation. That is why we should pay attention to the Expanding Whistleblower Protections for Contractors Act of 2023, first introduced by Sens. Gary Peters (D-Mich) and Michael Braun (R-Ind.) and passed out of committee on a bipartisan basis, which would address the shortcomings in the current law.
Government contractors like these have a long history of saving thousands of taxpayer dollars, exposing our government’s wrongdoing, and, as in this case, saving countless lives; to be effective, laws that protect whistleblowers must encourage employees of conscience to speak up and deter employers from retaliating against them for doing so. If the Expanding Whistleblower Protections for Contractors Act is passed, more contractors could feel empowered to stand up for what is right with crucial information. Government Accountability Project is committed to continuing advocacy for greater whistleblower protections for government contractors and a more fair and transparent government.
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