Summary
The Office of Special Counsel, an independent agency that oversees illegal actions taken against federal workers, ruled that the mass firings of probationary federal workers (those in a trial period after being hired) are likely illegal.
The decision, affecting 6 cases, found that the terminations lacked individualized cause, violating federal rules.
OSC head Hampton Dellinger stated, “Firing probationary employees without individualized cause appears contrary to a reasonable reading of the law.”
This ruling could challenge the legality of nearly all such dismissals, opening the door for broader legal action.
I’m sure they’ll stop right away!
Guess who’s getting fired in the morning
Not a goddamn person that needs to be fired. That’s for sure.
At some point, all of this is going to cost the taxpayers a lot of money in legal fees and settlements.
It will either cost a lot in legal fees, or a lot in every fucking thing is broken everywhere and most services that were already busting at the seams to somewhat operate will just pop like melons under a giant truck tire.
Even if it does, I am certain that Musk himself will have zero legal liability here. His position is unofficial, all his authority is “because Trump says so”, and I strongly doubt he signing his name or signature on anything. That itself should scare people (even those who agree with what he’s doing), but most Americans are just sleepwalking.
If the USA had a functional justicebsystem, Musk would have been at least detained and bar from tpuchibg government systems… but alas, there is no functional law in the USA at the moment
Who needs the law when you’ve got money!
Oh, you don’t have money. I guess you need the law.
Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.
How amoosing!
Ok. It is illegal. The question is, are they going to do anything about it?
This is the exact problem. Trump and Musk are walking through the forest firing a flamethrower indiscriminately, and there are a bunch of people on the outskirts yelling “Hey, you can’t do that!”
At some point all the people fired will likely get some money, some may get jobs. It probably takes at least a year for that to happen though.
Oh it’s gonna cost the government a fortune in lawsuits, people will get their salary and job back
Now that’s government efficiency.
After considering this question carefully, I expect the answer is: the square root of fuck all.
So, arrest him?
Yeah, his income level puts him on the “petty fine” tier.
I will accept no less than 99.99% of his net worth.
How about we chop him up into 10,000 pieces, and give you all but 1?
you want to leave him $4.02b?
Wouldn’t that be 400 million? (400bil x 99.99%) Still a lot, and I could retire happily off that much for sure.
Mental arithmetic was never my strong point
Hilariously I think you actually both did it wrong but it’s still a shitload of money that any reasonable individual could comfortably retire with. Billionaires have so much money that misplacing a few decimal places here and there hardly even matters.
400,000,000,000 x .0001 = 40,000,000
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=what+is+.01%25+of+400+billion+
If someone dropped 40 million on me tomorrow I’d be happy to fuck off back to whatever rock I crawled out from under
i did 400,000,000,000 * 0.01 the second time i worked it out.
Not sure what i did to get 4.02 billion though
But the DOGE guys are so cool. That guy is the next Tony Stark with a totally huge penis. And those children running the day to day workings of DOGE definitely slay removed. Not punchable faces at all!
Okay, Adrian Dittman.
It’s kind of funny (the sad kind of funny) that people with years of legal studies and experience have to meet and formally rule that something blatantly illegal to the point of stupidity is… well… illegal.
“If I have a made-up position that my own government admits is not an official one, can I go ahead and randomly fire thousands of people?”
“A ha! Good question, let’s see what my copy of The Legal System for Dummies says!”
I mean, they know it’s not “legal”, they are just testing the boundaries of judicial oversight. They are going to push boundaries and whenever they get any kind of push back they are going to scream about persecution and claim judicial over reach.
The point is to overwhelm the system to the point of breaking and then claim we don’t need to listen to the judicial system, because look how broken it is.
These people aren’t stupid, they’re just fascist who know things like legal systems are social contracts that depend on good will and trust to operate. If they can break that good will and trust them they can rewrite the social contract.
It is dangerous to assume these people are just stupid.
Just gonna quote the smart relevant alarming resharable parts of this comment
I mean, they know it’s not “legal”, they are just testing the boundaries of judicial oversight. They are going to push boundaries and whenever they get any kind of push back they are going to scream about persecution and claim judicial over reach.
The point is to overwhelm the system to the point of breaking and then claim we don’t need to listen to the judicial system, because look how broken it is.
These people aren’t stupid, they’re just fascist who know things like legal systems are social contracts that depend on good will and trust to operate. If they can break that good will and trust them they can rewrite the social contract.
It is dangerous to assume these people are just stupid.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t think they are stupid, just that they are doing blatantly stupid, over-the-top stuff.
On purpose? Yes it’s a really scary thought that this might be a coup in slo-mo. And I mean slo-mo just relative to the more common “army abruptly takes power” approach, but it’s still disturbingly fast.
It’s kind of funny (the sad kind of funny) that people with years of legal studies and experience have to meet and formally rule that something blatantly illegal to the point of stupidity is… well… illegal.
Well yeah - that’s how it works. If you don’t care about law and rules you just do shit. The people who enforce the rules have to follow them and go through processes - and by gum that’s time and work! (And who wants to do work? Definitely none of the judges and lawyers I’ve met lol)
If they imminent domain your house to build a turnpike to siphon off money to foreign investors - that’s on you to put the time and effort into fighting it. If they run voucher programs and charter school scams that benefit their friends - well, they have other friends who often are the ones supposed to enforce the rules. They act, you have to pull yourself together and react. How can you fight an illegal eviction if you’re too busy trying to find a new place to sleep?
It’s that old idea that the state has a monopoly on violence.
And while you’re legally following all the rules they’re already moving on to the next thing and cornering you before you even act.
This is your landlord illegally evicting you and then also lying to get you arrested and then paying someone to murder you in jail.
The double bind too is that people think when illegal things happen that they get stopped, so they don’t believe that the illegal things are even happening. So many levers of justice - in the US at least - are really determined by one’s ability to get access to a lawyer or the ever increasing rarity of getting sympathetic news coverage.
There is no justice, and then no one believes you. If the gaslighting brings you to mental illness - even more justification to pretend these things aren’t happening.
So each fired employee saves, let’s say, $75,000. Then each sues the government and wins a $250,000 settlement, and gets their job back. Of course the government spends $300,000 on lawyers for each case. The savings practically leap into our pockets!
At least in four years they can blame the democrats
It’s an ouroborus - a self feeding problem that will always be able to Boogeyman the problem it caused. Those employees will then be painted as wasting money by tying up courts for settlements, decried like the McDonald’s coffee incident all over again.
There’s also nothing efficient about firing people from various critical agencies and then scrambling to bring the back after their records have been purged.
How many will not want to come back too? Or even if they do will now be looking to leave.
While the decision is limited to those six workers, its implication is that all, or nearly all, of the mass firings of probationary government workers by President Donald Trump violate the laws regulating government employment
It’s only for the trainees at present, not sure why the title exaggerated
Excellent username.
They deserve to get every penny of that too; it’s a stupidity tax.
I found out yesterday the government employees who received a promotion are also put on probation. Someone I know was fired after 20years of service just for the crime of being a good enough employee to deserve a promotion.
So they didn’t even just limit it to new-hire probationary employees, but also included people who just entered a new title after being an employee for years?
So so so fucking dumb.
If we still have a functioning government and legal system after all of this is said and done, the federal government will be paying out billions of dollars in (completely reasonable) lawsuits.
Super efficient.
It’s easy to miss that kind of thing without testing. Traditionally it’s been considered a decent idea to spend more than six seconds firing thousands of people.
Was probably put on “supervisory probation” which is for all new supervisors. I.e., its not just an increase in pay due to increased skills/duties.
I know someone in the same boat and I was wondering if they would get caught in all this stupidity as well.
Now a look at tomorrows news: Trump orders the office of special counsel to let a 5 year old doge “employee” install a scraper in their server room with sysadmin access.
Guaranteed trump just found out this office exists because of this ruling
Actually, Hampton Dellinger himself was already fired earlier in the purge, but was temporarily reinstateted by a lower court and that was upheld by the Supreme Court (so far). It’s been one of the first cases to land on their desk, and is worth watching closely.
Where’s the BOFH when you need him? The server room? Certainly, just through this doorway… Oh! Whoops, my mistake, that was the unfinished fire escape.
sounds like elon just found some new inefficiency
/s
Oh man. They’re gonna get it now!!! No way they get out of this without absolutely anything happening and just continue to do what they’ve been doing!!
Everything President Felon and VP KetamineTrip are doing is illegal. And it will cost BILLIONS in the end to fix. Money that was need for more important things.
