Federal employees, the ones that chose to stick around though mass layoffs, DOGE and voluntary resignation offers, are trying to tell you something: your government is under attack.
Civil servants are sending out SOS signals at an unprecedented level, despite great personal risk. NASA and NIH wrote public protests about damage to their organizations. CDC leaders chose to quit to send “a bat signal” about the assault on science in their agency, and more than 1000 HHS employees have signed a letter calling on RFK Jr. to resign. FEMA employees who wrote an open letter about how bad things are were put on administrative leave. Now some EPA employees who did the same were fired. They join the almost 1 in 4 employees who have departed the agency since Trump arrived.
According to the law, these employees have for cause protections, meaning the government must document that they performed poorly at their job to be fired. But laws that are written down, and the practices of the Trump administration, are two different things. And in today’s America, our court system is increasingly favoring the latter.
The EPA employees were fired on Labor Day weekend, a Labor Day that marked a historic assault on labor. Half a million federal employees have lost union protections under Trump, with more to come. Legal agreements between the government and the unions were voided because, Trump said, national security demanded it. The justification beggars belief, since the employees are from across all sorts of agencies, not just those with a national security function, and strip rights from employees with no plausible national security responsibilities, such as janitorial staff.
Meanwhile, unions that have been more supportive of Trump, such as the Teamsters, have been exempted. Shamefully, courts are happy to go along with the fiction that this is an issue of national security, rather than Trump targeting organizations perceived as political opponents.
Unions might be imperfect, but they are the best organized representative of government employee interests at the time when Trump have been purging the government, including removing internal safeguards that would typically adjudicate on claims of unfair treatment of employees.
While unions are often portrayed as self-interested, lets look at the EPA. The American Federation of Government Employees renegotiated their union contract with EPA in 2024. With the potential for the Trump administration in mind, they union focused on protecting the scientific integrity of their member’s work. This is something that professional scientists care about, and which benefits the public. In other words, it is a domain where the public interest and union goals overlap.
The Trump administration has cancelled the contract and EPA bargaining rights, again invoking national security claims.
Clearly, a concern for science is not top of the Trump administration agenda. Hundreds of EPA employees signed a letter charging that actions of the Trump administration “undermine the EPA mission of protecting human health and the environment.” Fearing retribution, many did so anonymously, but 170 signed their names. Key parts of the letter focus on the assault on science within the EPA:
Ignoring scientific consensus to benefit polluters. This administration's actions directly contradict EPA's own scientific assessments on human health risks, most notably regarding asbestos, mercury, and greenhouse gases. Health-based regulatory standards are being repealed or reconsidered, including drinking water limits for four PFAS "forever chemicals" that cause cancer. Under your leadership, Administrator Zeldin, EPA is promoting the fossil fuel-powered auto industry while simultaneously stripping away support for cleaner electric vehicles. You are supporting new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), without addressing AI's intense consumption of environmental resources. The decisions of the current administration frequently contradict the peer-reviewed research and recommendations of Agency experts. Such contradiction undermines EPA's reputation as a trusted scientific authority. Make no mistake: your actions endanger public health and erode scientific progress--not only in America--but around the world…
Dismantling the Office of Research and Development. EPA's research provides the scientific basis for its rulemaking, stakeholder needs, and other key decisions. U.S. Law (42 U.S.C. § 4363) states that the EPA Administrator shall "establish a separately identified program of continuing, long-term environmental research and development," which is currently led by the Office of Research and Development, or ORD. Your administration has proposed a reorganization that moves EPA's foundational research to the Administrator's Office and reassigns ORD's research staff to the program offices. A move that places ORD scientists in regulatory program offices will make EPA science more vulnerable to political interference. In addition, the gutting of staff and science and your proposed budget cuts for the coming year will leave ORD unable to meet the science needs of the EPA and its partners and will threaten the health of all Americans.
The basic claim here is that political leadership is ignoring science, and eliminating scientific offices in what is fundamentally a scientific agency.
About 140 employees were put on administrative leave for signing the letter, before at least seven of those employees were fired. Trump appointees said that “the Environmental Protection Agency has a zero-tolerance policy for career officials using their agency position and title to unlawfully undermine, sabotage, and undercut the will of the American public that was clearly expressed at the ballot box last November.”
It is not an unreasonable claim that bureaucrats owe a duty of loyalty to their political bosses. Elections, after all, do matter. On the other hand, shouldn’t we want scientists to alert Congress and the public about what is going on inside their agency when they see red lines being crossed?
The administrative law professor Jennifer Nou has considered this question. She argued that many civil servants are too quick to dissent, but also provided a logic for when dissent might be justified. She calls for “reciprocal hierarchy” – a system where disobedience is inappropriate as long as political actors engage with and consult with bureaucratic experts on factual matters related to their expertise. But, when political actors fail to engage with bureaucratic actors on their domains of expertise, domains that Congress has invested in and built up over time, the hierarchy is no longer operating in a reciprocal manner. Under such conditions it becomes defensible to engage in dissent.
And those are very much the conditions we operate under now. Not only are scientists ignored; anyone raising public concerns about mismanagement of government programs and undermining of statutory missions can expect retaliation. The dysfunction must be kept secret.
Administrative myths: The gold bars
It is not just eliminating employees. EPA is also eliminating grants that were previously funded by Congress. And again, Trump’s allies on the courts are letting them do it.
At stake is $20 billion in grants to address climate change, which the EPA is trying to cancel. The grants are provided via the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF), funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, which ordered the money to be committed in 2024. The grants were publicly announced, with the goal of encouraging private capital to join in climate change responses, and help low-income families reduce energy costs with upgrades.
There is no meaningful evidence that the grants were mismanaged or wasteful. They were distributed in a agreement to Citibank to distribute and provide oversight of the grants, and allowing them to raise red flags for wasteful spending. (The use of this kind of public-private Financial Agency Agreements is more common than you would think). However, the existence of the money at Citibank offered a tempting target, and EPA has sought to reclaim the funds.
In the US District Court for DC, a judge paused the cancelations, pointing to constitutional violations. Two Trump appointees on the DC Circuit overturned the lower court decision. They say that the grants were actually contracts, and therefore only the Court of Federal Claims could review the claim.
This feels like a pattern of the second Trump term. Judges blocking Trump point to major violations of the law and constitution, while Judges supporting Trump often rely on technicalities to allow him to move forward. And so Trump ploughs ahead, and does what he wants.
The DC Circuit said that the affected firms that lost the grants can ask for compensation for their losses (for which EPA and taxpayers will potentially be liable). But this misses the point. The courts are allowing the administration to cancel prior policies involving obligated funds. That is the broader harm: the Trump administration negated the distribution of past funds as ordered by Congress, effectively cancelling a lawful climate change program without going through Congress to do so. The decision is part of an ongoing pattern of the Trump administration claiming Congressional powers, and of Trump appointees in the judiciary enabling this power grab.
In dissent, Judge Pillard said:
the majority allows the government to seize Plaintiffs’ money based on spurious and pretextual allegations and to permanently gut implementation of major congressional legislation designed to improve the infrastructure, health, and economic security of communities throughout the country.
To illustrate how pretextual these claims were, and how much judicial pretzeling the majority needed to engage in, I have to tell you about the gold bars. It is a bit of a detour, but bear with me.
Mention of the EPA tossing aside gold bars is “damning” according to Neomi Rao, the judge who wrote the majority opinion, and “supports EPA’s good faith in deciding to terminate the grants and recommit the funds with proper supervision and accountability.”
EPA Administrator Lee Zedlin refers to these gold bars a lot. For example, this is the EPA website.
The gold bars paint quite a picture. The problem is, they do not actually exist. They are a potent symbol, and symbols is what you go with when you don’t have evidence.
At the heart of the issue is that the Trump administration has tried and failed to present the grant funding as criminal, the financial arrangement as crooked, and the plaintiffs as suspicious.
None of this is true, but Trump’s politicized justice system was happy to play along.
FBI employees were sent to investigate EPA employees as part of a criminal probe. Career prosecutors within DOJ refused to open an investigation because there simply was not evidence of wrongdoing. Indeed, one resigned rather than engage in such a blatant abuse of the law. Her resignation letter, addressed to the then-acting US Attorney for DC, Ed Martin, includes the following:
As I shared with you, at this juncture, based upon the evidence I have reviewed, I still do not believe that there is sufficient evidence to issue the letter you described, including sufficient evidence to tell the bank that there is probable cause to seize the particular accounts identified. Because I believed that I lacked the legal authority to issue such a letter, I told you that I would not do so. You then asked for my resignation.
Emil Bove, a Trump DOJ appointee and now a federal judge, pushed another set of career prosecutors to investigate, but they also refused.
The goal was to use allegations of criminality to justify a de facto seizure of assets. Non-partisan actors who looked at the allegations could find neither smoke nor fire. This did not deter the Trump administration, who assumed they could find a partisan actor — in the form of Trump federal judges — who would let them reclaim the money regardless. They were correct.
So where did the gold bars come from?
The short answer is that it was an off-hand remark by an EPA employee, Brent Efron. Efron thought he was on a date with an unusually inquisitive partner who wanted to learn about his job. The date was actually an undercover agent for Project Veritas, the right-wing smear machine, which employs the tactics of spy agencies to deceive and discredit public employees.
The date occurred after Trump’s victory but before his inauguration. Efron talked about how his agency was doing their best to get money out the door before the Trump administration took office, saying: “It truly feels we’re on the Titanic and we’re throwing gold bars off the edge.”
Efron was being recorded. The video became the proof to conservatives of the criminal conspiracy that the EPA and DOJ were unable to prove.
Efron was a mid-level official with no real control over the flow of billions of dollars engaged in barroom bluster. After the story blew up, with the help of Elon Musk, Efron faced an internal investigation (he was cleared), and the predictable abuse that followed. Efron left the government in January. He has been unable to find work since then according to a recent profile. When the FBI interviewed him in February, a prosecutor from the US Attorney’s office and investigators from the EPA Inspector General office were present.
Lee Zedlin has used the “gold bars” video relentlessly to justify cancelling the grants (he refers to them as grants, even if the court calls them contracts). Zedlin was the one who asked an Inspector General to open an investigation. He told Fox News: “The entire scheme, in my opinion, is criminal. We found the gold bars. We want them back.”
Again, it is very important to note, there are no gold bars. Nevertheless, they were invoked by the judge who wrote the opinion allowing Trump to block distribution of the funds. Now, lets be real here: the judge in question, Neomi Rao, worked in the Trump Office of Management and Budget and is hoping for a Supreme Court seat — she knows better but has other goals.
The idea that one administration wanted to insulate its policies from its successor is not surprising. The basic reality is that the Biden administration wanted to spend money on climate change, and Congress funded it. They found a well-used legal mechanism that they felt would protect the spending from a de facto impoundment under Trump. There is no criminality in that. The issue is simply about whether a President can cancel previously appropriated and allocated grants. The courts are effectively allowing Trump to do so.
What are the big lessons here?
Stripping employees of union rights and civil service protections makes it easier for a government to stifle dissent, even when that dissent exposes profound mismanagement. It is one way that weakening employee protections undermines accountability to the public.
The weaponization of the justice system can be turned on federal employees, all to create the appearance of wrongdoing in order to justify a power grab.
Even if a politicized justice system cannot deliver a prosecution, it can work in other ways. The “gold bars” myth was:
created by Trump supporters outside of government targeting federal employees
weaponized by Trump supporters in the media
used to justify unprecedented grabbing of assets by the Trump supporters inside government
upheld by the Trump supporters on the bench.
The effects were real: a major initiative passed by Congress no longer exists, undermining America’s ability to address the mounting threats of climate change.
I am not saying that experts should control decisionmaking. But in an administration where the Secretary of Energy does not understand that electricity is a form of energy, it seems safe to say that they might want to consult with government scientists slightly more frequently.
Excellent discussion, as always. Too bad there isn't a vaccine to prevent stupidity. Of course, if it did exist, those who need it would prevent it from being used.