Workers from across the federal government set off a legal counteroffensive against President Trump and Elon Musk on Tuesday, challenging the legality of efforts to raze their agencies, single them out publicly or push them out of their jobs.
The raft of lawsuits, filed by F.B.I. agents, public sector unions, representatives of older Americans and liberal-leaning legal groups, hinges on fine points of law that deal with matters ranging from the privacy of taxpayer data to intricacies of federal rule-making. But together, they amount to the opening shots in an emerging legal battle over the constitutional order, checks and balances and the founders’ vision of the separation of powers.
It will be up to the courts to decide whether the president has the power to not only direct the executive branch, but also to forcefully recast it in his own image. It may also be up to the judicial branch of government to find a way to ensure that its own decisions are enforced.
In short order on Tuesday, three government unions sued the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, or OPM — the federal government’s human resources division — to block an effort to convince roughly two million federal employees to resign from their jobs early.
Two groups of F.B.I. agents and bureau employees sued to block Mr. Trump from releasing the names of agents and staff members who participated in the investigations into the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, trying to head off what they fear is a looming purge.
Labor unions and a retirees’ group sued the Treasury Department to restrict access to sensitive Treasury systems that contain the private information of millions of Americans — and that the plaintiffs say may have already been compromised by Mr. Musk’s employees through what he has labeled the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Separately, a group of transgender plaintiffs led by advocacy organizations and the American Civil Liberties Union sued to block Mr. Trump’s order to defund gender-transition treatments for people under the age of 19. Two other pending lawsuits seek to block an executive order that would require the Bureau of Prisons to transfer trans female inmates to men’s prisons. On Tuesday evening, one of those suits won a temporary restraining order, signed by Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the District of Columbia. It bars the Justice Department from transferring trans women to men’s facilities or denying them gender-transition treatments, as mandated by one of Mr. Trump’s executive orders.
Earlier, two federal employees, using pseudonyms, sued OPM to block the agency’s access to the email address that sent the governmentwide resignation offer, which was similar to one Mr. Musk had sent to Twitter’s employees after acquiring the company.
The White House press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Collectively, the legal actions seek to check what the plaintiffs see as an unlawful effort — often helmed by Mr. Musk, an unelected billionaire with no formal position — to subvert long-established civil service protections and to grab from Congress its constitutionally mandated control of federal spending.
But they are being pursued against a darkening backdrop of fear and possible intimidation.
“I would argue that there is the potential for physical harm,” Kelly McClanahan, a lawyer for the two federal workers, argued in a hearing on Tuesday, pleading that his clients needed to remain anonymous or risk reprisals from supporters of Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk. “They have a history of putting people on blast, of tweeting out their names.”
At the heart of much of the action is Mr. Musk’s new organization, which is not a department or official division but which has amassed extraordinary power in a matter of weeks, ostensibly to cut costs and reorder the government. An executive order calling for “DOGE teams” to be inserted within each federal agency claims its mission is “to implement the president’s DOGE agenda by modernizing federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”
On Monday, Mr. Musk appeared to take credit for shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development, a 63 year-old agency that funds health and development initiatives around the world. “We spent the weekend feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the wood chipper,” he wrote in a social media post.
Federal employees and their lawyers say Mr. Musk’s staff, some of whom are in their late teens or early 20s, have seized the controls of some of the most sensitive data and information systems at the heart of the federal bureaucracy. These include an official email address that can contact almost all of the government’s two million employees and a system at the Treasury that issues many payments from across the federal government.
Both are the focus of two of the lawsuits. According to one suit, Mr. Musk’s reach at Treasury means his group can access “names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, birth places, home addresses and telephone numbers, email addresses and bank account information about millions of individuals.”
White House officials have repeatedly said the claim is overblown. In a letter to Congress, the Treasury Department said that the Musk group’s access to payment systems was “read-only.”
Another one of the lawsuits, organized by Democracy Forward, a liberal-leaning legal nonprofit, argued that the push for governmentwide resignations is illegal. In their complaint, the plaintiffs argue that the effort ignores civil service rules and promises to reward employees who resign with money that hasn’t yet been appropriated by Congress for that purpose.
In an interview, Skye Perryman, Democracy Forward’s chief executive, accused Mr. Musk and his group of seeking to undo the merit-based system that has been the foundation of the civil service for more than a century, and return the country to a corrupt era when government jobs were handed out as political favors.
“This effort is seeking to revert us back to an unworkable system known as the spoils system,” she said, “one that the country abandoned in the 1800s, because it was not delivering for people.”
A third lawsuit seeks a restraining order to stop the Office of Personnel Management from sending out governmentwide emails from [email protected] until the agency has completed a required privacy assessment. That lawsuit claims that DOGE is planning to conduct mass firings, and that it has brought in outside email servers that are potentially vulnerable to foreign hackers.
The individuals in the cases relating to the F.B.I. and transgender care also filed under pseudonyms. One of the lawyers echoed the worry that releasing the plaintiffs’ names could bring harm to those who use established legal channels to challenge Mr. Trump’s policies.
“It is clear that the threatened disclosure is a prelude to an unlawful purge of the F.B.I. driven solely by the Trump administration’s vengeful and political motivations,” Chris Mattei, a lawyer for the F.B.I. Agents Association, said in a statement. “Releasing the names of these agents would ignite a firestorm of harassment toward them and their families, and it must be stopped immediately.”
The lawsuits came in response to a demand by Emil Bove, the acting deputy attorney general, that the F.B.I. compile and turn over a list of everyone who worked on the Capitol riot cases. That group, the lawsuits estimated, could include as many as 6,000 agents.
The Trump administration has not said it intends to release the identities of the law enforcement officials. The information the F.B.I. provided on Tuesday identified employees by their workplace IDs, their title at the time of the relevant investigation or prosecution and the date of the last action related to the investigation, among other details, but not their names.
But the administration’s demand for names of people who worked on the cases has stoked the belief that it may move to fire them en masse.
The post A Legal Counteroffensive to Beat Back Trump’s Government Purges appeared first on New York Times.
