CNN
—
Special counsel Hampton Dellinger says he is dropping his lawsuit to try to keep his job after President Donald Trump fired him. His decision comes a day after the federal appeals court in Washington temporarily removed him from the position and ends what was poised to be a major test of Trump’s power to fire officials with some independence in the federal government.
Dellinger’s case had the potential of rewriting the law around Congressionally approved protections for the federal civil service. But it is no longer going to move forward in the court system, removing the possibility of the Supreme Court to revisit Dellinger’s job’s independence from the president’s wishes.
The case had been the first to land before the Supreme Court with emergency proceedings challenging Trump’s executive power and, at the moment, was winding its way back through lower courts.
Dellinger said he was dropping his case on Thursday after the federal Circuit Court in Washington, DC sided with Trump’s Justice Department to keep him out of the special counsel role for now.
“This new ruling means that [the Office of Special Counsel] will be run by someone totally beholden to the President for the months that would pass before I could get a final decision from the US Supreme Court,” Dellinger said in a statement on Thursday. “I think the circuit judges erred badly because their willingness to sign off on my ouster – even if presented as possibly temporary – immediately erases the independence Congress provided for my position, a vital protection that has been accepted as lawful for nearly fifty years.”
He added that he thought the Supreme Court might ultimately side against him and with Trump: “Given the circuit court’s adverse ruling, I think my odds of ultimately prevailing before the Supreme Court are long. 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 was appointed to the job a year ago and was to continue in the role for five years before Trump removed him.
The special counsel — who investigates worker complaints from across the federal civil service and is different from the more high-profile Justice Department special counsels — has been arguing in recent weeks to reinstate probationary workers at many agencies that the Trump administration has fired en masse.
Those petitioners so far have been successful, bringing nearly 6,000 Agriculture Department workers back to their jobs this week, and Dellinger had been continuing work on federal firing cases for others large groups that have been laid off from agencies under the Trump administration. A workers’ board, called the Merit Systems Protection Board, was still hearing the cases before making final decisions.
“My fight to stay on the job was not for me, but rather for the ideal that OSC should be as Congress intended: an independent watchdog and a safe, trustworthy place for whistleblowers to report wrongdoing and be protected from retaliation,” Dellinger said in a statement on Thursday. “Now I will look to make a difference – as an attorney, a North Carolinian, and an American – in other ways.”
