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  • I think that their best move is gonna be joining any class-action lawsuit and then starting to look for a new job.

    If such a lawsuit succeeds in getting them reinstatement or compensation, great.

    But most of the arguments I've seen on legality center on the President not being able to lay people off without Congressional action. And even if that's true and courts find it to be illegal, the problem is that I would guess that Congress, which has both houses controlled by the Republican Party, is onboard with the layoffs, and just doesn't want to do them directly, due to potential political cost. If employees win on an appeal or court case related to this, then I suspect that that just means that they still get laid off, this time with Congress involved. That's not what the federal employees want -- they want to not be laid off.

    Will rallies change things? Yeah, elections could change things. But Trump did this immediately at the start of his term, I assume intentionally. If he had done so at the end of his term, they could maybe be reinstated quickly by a new administration that held a different view of matters without that much disruption. But as things are, the earliest time one could see change in position from Congress is after the midterms in two years, and the earliest time from the President in four years. Even if control of Congress changing is enough, if a meaningful change involves passing a law, it would be over Trump's veto, which means the Democrats going from a minority in both houses to a veto-proof two-thirds supermajority in both, which seems unlikely (in fact, I'm not sure that that's even possible in the Senate in the upcoming midterms, since only some of the Senate stands for re-election each election). So it's almost certainly at least four years until relevant political change. That's a long time to be sitting around without a job hoping all of that (a) there will be political change, (b) their job will show up again and c) that they will be hired into it.