An agency head fired by President Donald Trump is ending the legal battle to regain his job, admitting he is unlikely to succeed at the Supreme Court.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the Trump administration Wednesday night, blocking a lower court order that prevented Trump from removing Hampton Dellinger as head of the Office of Special Counsel.
“I’m stopping the fight because, yesterday, circuit court judges reviewing the trial court decision in my favor granted the government’s request that I be removed from office while the case continues,” Dellinger wrote in a statement. “This new ruling means that OSC 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 U.S. Supreme Court.”
U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled Saturday that Dellinger had been wrongly removed from his position.
“The Special Counsel’s job is to look into and expose unethical or unlawful practices directed at federal civil servants, and to help ensure that whistleblowers who disclose fraud, waste, and abuse on the part of government agencies can do so without suffering reprisals,” Jackson wrote. “It would be ironic, to say the least, and inimical to the ends furthered by the statute if the Special Counsel himself could be chilled in his work by fear of arbitrary or partisan removal.”
In the period he was allowed to remain in his position, Dellinger opposed the Trump administration’s efforts to terminate employment of some federal workers. As a result, the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board ordered probationary employees at the Department of Agriculture who were terminated to be reinstated for 45 days.
Dellinger wrote that his legal fight was not for himself but “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.”
“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 wrote.
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