Federal civil servants are supposed to enjoy robust protections against being fired or demoted for political reasons. But President Donald Trump has effectively stripped them of these protections by neutralizing the federal agencies that implement these safeguards.

An agency known as the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) hears civil servants’ claims that a “government employer discriminated against them, retaliated against them for whistleblowing, violated protections for veterans, or otherwise subjected them to an unlawful adverse employment action or prohibited personnel practice,” as a federal appeals court explained in an opinion on Tuesday. But the three-member board currently lacks the quorum it needs to operate because Trump fired two of the members.

Trump also fired Hampton Dellinger, who until recently served as the special counsel of the United States, a role that investigates alleged violations of federal civil service protections and brings related cases to the MSPB. Trump recently nominated Paul Ingrassia, a far-right podcaster and recent law school graduate to replace Dellinger.

The upshot of these firings is that no one in the government is able to enforce laws and regulations protecting civil servants. As Dellinger noted in an interview, the morning before a federal appeals court determined that Trump could fire him, he’d “been able to get 6,000 newly hired federal employees back on the job,” and was working to get “all probationary employees put back on the job [after] their unlawful firing” by the Department of Government Efficiency and other Trump administration efforts to cull the federal workforce.

These and other efforts to reinstate illegally fired federal workers are on hold, and may not resume until Trump leaves office.

Which brings us to the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit’s decision in National Association of Immigration Judges v. Owen, which proposes an innovative solution to this problem.

As the Owen opinion notes, the Supreme Court has held that the MSPB process is the only process a federal worker can use if they........

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