By Mattathias Schwartz and Charlie Savage
Workers from across the federal government set off a legal counteroffensive against President Donald Trump and Elon Musk earlier this week, 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 FBI 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 rulemaking. 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 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 persuade roughly 2 million federal employees to resign from their jobs early.
Two groups of FBI agents and bureau employees sued to block Trump from releasing the names of agents and staff members who participated in the investigations into the Capitol riot 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 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 Trump’s order to defund gender-transition treatments for people under age 19. Two other pending lawsuits seek to block an executive order that would require the Bureau of Prisons to transfer transgender 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 transgender women to men’s facilities or denying them gender-transition treatments, as mandated by one of 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 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 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 Tuesday, pleading that his clients needed to remain anonymous or risk reprisals from supporters of Trump and Musk. “They have a history of putting people on blast, of tweeting out their names.”
Federal employees and their lawyers say 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 2 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, 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 CEO, accused 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 HR@opm.gov 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 FBI and transgender care also filed under pseudonyms.
The lawsuits came in response to a demand by Emil Bove, the acting deputy attorney general, that the FBI 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 FBI provided 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.
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