Commentary: Big Tent Ideas

HOUSTON KEENE: Americans Lose When Unelected Bureaucrats Try To Play Politics With Federal Jobs

Joe Gratz/Flickr

A district judge’s recent order to overturn the Trump administration’s decision to fire federal employees proves America’s entrenched unelected bureaucracy is not going down without a fight.

Yes, you heard that right: Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia recently ruled that the President of the United States must rehire the over 1,000 fired Voice of America (VOA) employees released last year. Thankfully, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit stayed the judge’s order, preventing it from going into effect for the moment. Still, Judge Lamberth’s move was a decision contrary to the Constitution’s separation of powers, and a slap in the face of the people who elected this administration to clean house.

Worse, this is just the latest instance of the judiciary encroaching on the executive branch’s power. This time it is calling into question the very idea of serving at the pleasure of the president.

In 2025, the Trump administration sought to reduce the operations of VOA, the U.S. Agency for Global Media (VOA’s parent company), and six other federal agencies down to the bare minimum mandated by law. While this aligns with the Trump administration’s mandate of streamlining the federal government, Judge Lamberth’s animosity toward the effort shows a glaring flaw in our checks and balances.

As a result of the district judge’s decision, 1,042 of VOA’s 1,147 employees were to be reinstated without the president’s approval. However, a three-judge appeals court panel stayed the reinstatement order on March 31 pending further review. Thanks to this subsequent decision, these 1,000-plus employees will remain on leave while the appeals court weighs the case.

A successful bid to forcibly reinstate these federal employees would undermine the president’s authority to manage the executive branch. Trump and any future presidents would find it increasingly difficult to fire underperforming federal workers or trim the fat at other agencies and departments. Even if they prove successful in gutting the bureaucracy, they will have to engage in arduous legal battles along the way. This dynamic certainly does not foster the American people’s trust in their institutions, as they wonder who is really in charge.

Imagine you are the CEO of a hedge fund, and you have several employees who are doing nothing but sucking up resources that your shareholders want used elsewhere. So, acting on your fiduciary responsibility, you fire the underperforming employees and utilize their former salaries to create a more efficient company. But then an upstart agenda-driven judge who doesn’t like your company intervenes, ruling that you cannot fire these employees because their jobs are guaranteed by arbitrary or nonsensical regulations put into place by people just like them.

So, even though you had a right as the CEO to fire these employees, a judge requires you to rehire them. In the private sector, this kind of action is almost unheard of unless there’s a wrongful firing. But apparently different rules apply to our government.

Crazy, right?

That begs the question: why should federal workers be treated differently from private American citizens?

More importantly, a judicial decision forcing the rehiring of VOA employees undermines the will of the voters who elected the Trump administration to streamline the federal workforce. The bloated bureaucracy Americans have endured for decades consisted of nearly 2.5 million employees before the second Trump administration took power. Now, it’s at the lowest in at least a decade.

Despite this ongoing tug-of-war, the administration’s first year-and-a-half has been a leap in the right direction, starting with the efforts of the Department of Government Efficiency. On top of that, the administration enacted Schedule Policy/Career policy, the spiritual successor to the Schedule F rule that reclassifies certain federal employees, removes several protections and allows the President of the United States to terminate or reassign them at will. Additionally, the Trump administration’s executive order blocking federal workers from unionizing against key government agencies overcame a major legal obstacle in February.

The VOA case is just another attempt by an unelected bureaucracy to reassert its power as it faces the chopping block it has feared for decades. The only way to ensure that the federal government finally shrinks down to a manageable size is to stay the course – something President Trump must do to keep the power in the hands of the people and not the unelected bureaucrats or the special interests behind them.

Houston Keene is a journalist and contributor covering national security and federal policy with Democracy Restored.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

(Featured Image Media Credit: Joe Gratz/Flickr)