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A new Supreme Court opinion is terrible news for federal workers

Justice Barrett wants Trump to be able to fire everyone in the federal government.

Remember DOGE, the Elon Musk-led “government efficiency” project that spread chaos during President Donald Trump’s first few months back in office, fired tens of thousands of federal employees, and then vanished almost as abruptly as it began?

If you didn’t lose your job in one of Musk’s federal employee purges, or you aren’t one of the remaining federal civil servants who has to figure out how to do your job without many of your colleagues around, DOGE is probably little more than a memory. But the legacy of this era of arbitrary firings is still being litigated in federal court, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett just handed down some very bad news for nearly every civilian who works for the federal government.

Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser.

On the surface, the Supreme Court’s decision in Margolin v. National Association of Immigration Judges, which was handed down on Tuesday, is a bit removed from Elon’s brief stint as Trump’s human resources manager. The case concerns whether federal immigration judges have a First Amendment right to give public speeches about immigration law. And the full Supreme Court decided to get rid of the case using a procedural argument that has few implications for federal employees.

But Justice Clarence Thomas, in an opinion joined by Barrett, wrote a separate opinion that would allow Trump to strip all federal civil servants of employment protections that many federal workers have enjoyed since the Chester A. Arthur administration.

While Thomas often takes extreme positions, Barrett is a relative moderate who is close to the center of the GOP-controlled Supreme Court. So, if Barrett is willing to endorse Thomas’s one neat trick to abolish civil service protections, that’s a strong sign that a majority of the Court agrees with her position.

Republican judges have long backed a legal theory known as the “unitary executive,” which holds that the president must have the power to fire high-ranking government officials who lead federal agencies. But the unitary executive has not historically been understood to eliminate employment protections for civil servants and other relatively low-ranking federal employees.

Justice Antonin........

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