Remember DOGE.
The Elon Musk project. It swept into Washington, fired tens of thousands, caused chaos for three months, then vanished like it was never there. If you kept your badge, DOGE feels ancient now. Just a bad memory. But the legal damage? That is still festering in courtrooms across the country.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett just made it worse.
The news landed Tuesday. The case was Margolin v. National Association of Judges. On paper, boring. Immigration judges wanting to speak publicly about law. The Supreme Court threw the case out on a procedural technicality. Standard stuff. Most readers would glance at it and move on.
They should read Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence instead. And see who joined him. Barrett did.
It changes everything.
The One-Neat-Trick Loophole
Thomas, joined by the Court’s supposed moderate Barrett, laid out a plan that strips every federal civilian worker of job protections.
We have had those protections since Chester A. Arthur was president. 1883. The Pendleton Act. It was supposed to stop the “spoils system.” The idea was that a competent civil servant could survive an election cycle without fear of being purged by a new administration.
Thomas says those rights only exist if the President wants them to.
His logic is brutal in its simplicity. The Merit Systems Protection Board (MSBP) handles civil service disputes. It’s where you go when you get fired unfairly. If the President fires the members of the MSPB until it ceases to exist? Then there is no place to go. No court hears the case. The Fourth Circuit said the judiciary must step in. Thomas says no. He says if the board is gone, the remedy is gone.
So Trump can just fire the referees. Then fire everyone else.
Why is Barrett signing off on this?
She is the median vote on this Court. If she agrees with Thomas on this extreme unitary executive theory, the other conservatives will too. The “unitary executive” has long been a Republican legal fantasy that the President should control the entire bureaucracy. Usually, they argued for the right to fire agency heads. High officials. Cabinet levels. Not postal clerks. Not social security case workers.
Scalia warned against this distinction decades ago in Morrison v. Olson. He argued for the President’s power over “officers.” Not the entire rank and file. Thomas wants to collapse that distinction. Barrett says go for it.
Garfield’s Nightmare
Why did we even bother with the MSPB in the first place?
Imagine President James Garfield’s first day. Or watch the Netflix show Death by Lightning if you want a cinematic reminder. Garfield took office and the lobby filled with people wanting jobs. Not important jobs. Any job. They wanted their names put on a government payroll in exchange for political loyalty.
It was a circus. It wasted the President’s time. It bred corruption. You couldn’t get an economist to study monetary policy for Treasury because he knew a party flip in 1896 would erase his career overnight. Why study the economy if your job is political property?
Arthur passed the Pendleton Act because a disappointed job seeker assassinated Garfield.
Civil service laws weren’t built for comfort. They were built to keep the lights on when parties change. To allow whistleblowers to speak without getting fired. To stop politicians from forcing workers into campaigns.
The MSPB is the engine of that system.
Trump knew this. In his first months of the second term, he paralyzed the board. Fired members. Fired the Special Counsel. Tried to replace an independent investigator with a right-wing podcaster.
(The podcaster bailed after admitting to having a “Nazi streak.” Good look at Politico.)
Trump eventually left the board with the bare minimum of two members so it could barely function. But for months it had one. It couldn’t act. It couldn’t help anyone.
Barrett’s opinion validates that paralysis. It suggests the paralysis is the point.
No Recourse
What does this mean for you? Or your cousin? Or the person processing your visa?
If the current Supreme Court has its way, a future President can decimate the civil service simply by targeting the adjudicators.
Look at McMahon v. New York. Earlier this year, the Court allowed Trump to fire half the Department of Education staff. No opinion. Just a rubber stamp from the shadow docket. The conservative majority didn’t explain themselves. They just let it happen.
Now Thomas has given the map. And Barrett walked the path.
The consensus from 1883 is dead. The idea that government employs professionals, not political patsies, is gone. Or it is dormant, waiting for the next administration to pull the trigger on the MSPB appointments.
Barrett believes the President has plenary power to erase the bureaucracy’s job protections by erasing the bureaucracy’s defenders.
So ask yourself. Is your job safe because the law says so? Or because the President hasn’t fired the judge yet?
