The Justice Department is accelerating its efforts to undo decades of civil service protections intended to insulate the work of law enforcement officials from political interference, according to current and former officials, ramping up a wave of firings in recent days.
A new batch of more than 20 career employees at the department and its component agencies were fired on Friday, including the attorney general’s own ethics adviser, Joseph W. Tirrell. Others who were dismissed included a handful of senior officials at the U.S. Marshals Service, as well as prosecutors and support staff who once worked for Jack Smith when he was a special counsel prosecuting Donald J. Trump.
On the surface, the various groups have little in common. Justice Department veterans, however, see an overarching pattern: a quickening effort by the Trump administration to ignore and eventually demolish longstanding civil service legal precedents meant to keep politics out of law enforcement work, and to give more leeway to the president’s loyalists.
The latest round of dismissals appears to have picked up steam after the Supreme Court last week allowed, for the time being, the administration to go forward with mass layoffs of federal workers. The decision gave the president more legal leeway to fire people en masse, at least for now.
Posting on a networking site on Monday, Mr. Tirrell asserted that he had been fired without cause and shared his termination notice from Attorney General Pam Bondi. The letter misspelled his name and did not offer a specific reason for his dismissal, saying only that the Constitution authorized it.
Employment law experts say such letters are at odds with decades of case law, as well as the decisions of an obscure part of the federal government called the Merit Service Protection Board. Taken together, both have stood for the principle that career civil servants can be fired only for cause.
In recent cases, however, the Trump administration has pushed the idea that such protections no longer exist for federal workers, including at the Justice Department.
In a filing last week, Justice Department lawyers said it would not turn over any internal communications related to the firing in March of Elizabeth G. Oyer, the pardon attorney, because the questions “are purely legal and do not require factual development.”
Ms. Oyer filed suit after being dismissed, claiming wrongful termination. She described herself as a whistle-blower who was punished for refusing to go along with an effort by the Trump administration to restore the gun rights of the actor Mel Gibson, who has been a prominent supporter of the president.
After Ms. Oyer’s firing, the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, issued a statement declaring her account of the events “false.” In the court filing last week, however, Justice Department lawyers declared that the facts of the firing were “not in dispute.”
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.
Ms. Oyer, one of dozens of Justice Department employees fighting their terminations before the protection board, said the administration’s legal tactic made a mockery of the board’s role.
“They are openly defying longstanding laws and specific directions of the presiding judge,” Ms. Oyer said in a statement. “They are working to sabotage the protections in place for nonpolitical civil servants,” part of what she called a broader effort “to install political puppets in place of nonpartisan experts throughout the Department of Justice.”
The president, she added, “is building a team of loyalists who will use their official positions to carry out his revenge agenda, and he is clearing out people of principle who may stand in his way.”
Ed Martin, a devoted Trump supporter who has vowed to “name” and “shame” people he cannot build criminal cases against, is now the pardon attorney. Mr. Martin was originally nominated to be the U.S. attorney in Washington, but he failed to win support from a majority of the Republican-controlled Senate.
Employment lawyers and critics of Mr. Trump have vowed to fight his administration’s firing campaign in court. The surge of cases before the Merit Service Protection Board may be just a prelude to the Supreme Court’s taking up the issue, since the president has argued that his constitutional authority supersedes any legal protections for federal workers.
Skye Perryman, the president and chief executive of Democracy Forward, said the administration was simply wrong when it claimed that the Constitution gives the attorney general the power to fire any Justice Department employee. “We will continue to use every legal tool available to challenge this claim,” she said.
Despite his dismissal, Mr. Tirrell wrote that he would continue to try to serve in the government.
“My public service is not over, and my career as a federal civil servant is not finished,” he wrote, noting that he had taken an oath to his country at least a half-dozen times. “That oath did not come with the caveat that I need only support the Constitution when it is easy or convenient. I look forward to finding ways to continue in my personal calling of service to my country.”
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
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