No plan—not his *MAHA* agenda, not efficiency, nothing—can realistically explain cuts like these. Instead, the #MassFirings don’t seem to be a means to an end on the way to overhauling American #health. They are an end in themselves.

It’ll take months, if not years, to fully appreciate the effect that the cuts will have on America’s scientific enterprise.

If the #DOJ wins, as many experts predict it will, the entire executive branch would come under #Trump’s direct control, allowing him even greater power over federal policy, & leaving virtually no barriers to his #MassFirings of civil servants in favor of political stooges.

#Trump has also tried to remove more than a dozen #InspectorsGeneral, as well as members of the National #Labor Relations Board [#NLRB] & the #Equal Employment Opportunity Commission [#EEOC]. Many of the ousted ofcls are contesting their removals in court.

In addition to fighting his own ouster, Dellinger has been arguing that the admin’s #MassFirings of probationary #FederalWorkers is illegal.

Elon Musk Gets His Most Brutal Smackdown Yet on #DOGE Firings

The judge slammed the #MassFirings as “illegal.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/192142/elon-musk-brutal-smackdown-doge-firings

"A federal #judge has ordered the Office of Personnel Mgmt to rescind #illegal instructions to cull the workforce of federal agencies...

““The #OPM does not have any authority whatsoever under any statute in the #history of the universe, to hire & fire employees within another agency”"

US Dist Judge William Alsup ordered #OPM to rescind its prior directives to #FederalAgencies including the Dept of #Defense, the #Park Service, Bureau of #Land Management, National #Science Foundation, & others. The ruling is one of the biggest roadblocks so far to #Trump’s effort to slash the federal workforce.

Another fired employee said the hundreds of dismissals meant that the #aid agency now had only a skeleton crew to respond to #humanitarian crises.

The appointee running day-to-day operations at #USAID is #PeteMarocco, a #State Dept official overseeing foreign aid who was a #divisive figure at the agency & other government departments in the first #Trump administration. Early this month, #MarcoRubio announced he was taking over the aid agency as acting administrator.

~400 people were fired in recent days from #humanitarian assistance positions…. ~200 of those were contractors for the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, …& another 200 were part of a unit called the Support Relief Group, a collection of #crisis experts who helped the bureau in responding quickly to #NaturalDisasters & armed conflicts. Now only about a dozen people remain in that group.

In addition, 36 people were fired from the Office of Transition Initiatives, a unit in the agency’s conflict prevention bureau that specializes in helping partner countries with political transitions & #democratic initiatives, said US officials & recent agency employees.

The latest round of dismissals occurred on Friday night, when hundreds of people working for the agency’s Bureau for #Humanitarian Assistance got emails saying their jobs had been terminated. Two employees who got the emails said they were strange because they did not state any job titles specifically & did not have the recipients’ names in the “to” field. They were generic emails sent out in a large wave.

US District Judge Christopher R. Cooper, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, ruled against the National #Treasury Employees #Union & 4 other #labor organizations that requested a temporary halt to the #Trump / #ElonMusk #MassFirings while a lawsuit challenging them is pending. More than half a million federal workers could lose their #jobs through the Trump admin’s firings & a separate program of deferred resignations, or buyouts, the unions said in legal filings.