Left: Donald Trump speaks at the annual Road to Majority conference in Washington, DC, in June 2024 (Allison Bailey/NurPhoto via AP). Right: Hampton Dellinger (Office of Special Counsel).
Hampton Dellinger, a booted-then-reinstated Biden ethics enforcer who is currently fighting to keep his job in federal court, has started sounding the alarm on firings at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with nearly 6,000 USDA workers officially getting their pink slips as of last week on the alleged basis that they weren’t “mission-critical” to the Trump administration.
Dellinger, who was appointed by Joe Biden in 2024 to lead the Office of Special Counsel and enforce whistleblower laws, filed a petition on Friday with the Merit Systems Protection Board asking it to stay the firings of approximately 5,900 probationary employees who were axed “without consideration of their individual performance or fitness for federal employment,” the document alleges.
“Rather … it did not identify their positions as ‘mission-critical,”” Dellinger writes. “USDA made no attempt to assess the individual performance or conduct of any of these probationary employees before deciding whether to terminate them … Whether USDA terminated each probationary employee therefore depended entirely on the nature of that employee’s position, not on the adequacy of their performance or fitness for federal service.”
Dellinger, himself, was axed by President Donald Trump “in a one-sentence email,” according to a lawsuit he filed in the District of Columbia last month. On Saturday, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that Dellinger’s termination from the Office of Special Counsel after Trump took office in January was illegal and unprecedented.
Jackson ruled in favor of letting Dellinger keep his job after listening to arguments from both sides at multiple hearings over the past month as part of a still-ongoing battle over a temporary restraining order that Jackson issued on Feb. 12 that allowed Dellinger to stay on board while she weighed his case. The move sets the stage for a critical Supreme Court showdown as the Justice Department has already fired off in an application to the nation’s highest court after multiple failed attempts by Trump to get Jackson’s TRO tossed last month, including an unsuccessful bid in the appeals court.
Trump’s DOJ has filed emergency motions with the appellate court in D.C. accusing Dellinger of “prosecuting complaints on behalf of terminated federal employees and seeking stays of their terminations” after being unlawfully reinstated by Jackson.
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Dellinger launched an OSC probe into Trump’s firings of six federal workers just days after Jackson issued a temporary restraining order reinstating him as special counsel. He conducted the investigation and then filed a petition with the Merit Systems Protection Board asking it to reverse the removals, which it did.
Dellinger issued a similar plea to MSPB members last Friday in his USDA petition, stating that a stay of the terminations would give OSC more time to investigate allegations of USDA’s “systemic merit systems abuses,” which include violations of civil service protections and federal personnel laws.
“In most cases, probationary employees in the competitive service may only be terminated if their performance or conduct demonstrates that they are unfit for federal employment,” Dellinger explained. “If agencies wish to terminate probationary employees not for performance or conduct, but as part of a general restructuring or downsizing, they must initiate a reduction in force (RIF) and follow the relevant procedures for that process.” That didn’t happen at USDA, according to the embattled special counsel head.
“The rules for probationary terminations and conducting RIFs are not technicalities,” Dellinger said. “Rather, they implicate federal employees’ substantive and procedural rights.”
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