Sean Spicer’s Lost Court Case Sets Huge Precedent for 47: ‘Trump Can Go in and Fire Everyone’

Can President-elect Donald Trump shake up the federal government by firing whoever he wishes on day one of his new administration? Former Trump White House press secretary Sean Spicer says yes — and the president-elect can thank Joe Biden firing him for that.

If you can remember back to 2021 — I know it’s difficult, especially if you’re Joe Biden — Spicer was fired along with two other Trump allies who had been appointed to the visitor boards at the Navy, the Air Force and Army academies. (Kellyanne Conway and Russ Vought were the other two, as the Washington Examiner noted.)

All three had time on their three-year terms in the positions — but no matter, Biden said. They were gone.

Instead of focusing on the stranded Americans left in #Afghanistan, President Biden is trying to terminate the Trump appointees to the Naval Academy, West Point and Air Force Academy.

My response tonight on #SpicerandCo at 6pm on @newsmax pic.twitter.com/p1SpyipvIm

— Sean Spicer (@seanspicer) September 8, 2021

Spicer and Vought sued, arguing they had congressionally mandated terms. They lost the suit, with the judge saying in his ruling that “[t]he Supreme Court has consistently held that ‘the power of removal from office is incident to the power of appointment’ ‘absent a specific provision to the contrary.’”

In other words, unless there’s specific language in place for the position that prevents the firing, there’s no impediment to it.

In an interview, Spicer said this means Trump can essentially clean house in regards to Biden appointees.

“What no one ever understood was this was not about actually getting back on the board, because my term had been expired for months,” Spicer said in an interview, according to the Examiner

“It was forcing them to argue in the affirmative that they had the ultimate authority to fire anybody at any time, which they did. And the court accepted that. So the Biden administration is now on record in court, and the court agreed that the president had absolute authority to fire anyone he wants.

“The whole point is now, on day one, President Trump can go in and fire everyone and say it was the Biden folks who told us that we could do this.”

Well, that’s certainly a lump of coal in government employees’ stockings.

Indeed, Spicer’s remarks come as Trump has announced he’ll challenge a deal the Social Security Administration reached with its union allowing a large number of its employees to work through home through 2029, according to CBS News.

“If people don’t come back to work, come back into the office, they’re going to be dismissed,” Trump said Monday.

Furthermore, firing work-from-home government employees has been one of the proposals touted by Trump’s newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

“Conventional wisdom holds that statutory civil-service protections stop the president or even his political appointees from firing federal workers. The purpose of these protections is to protect employees from political retaliation. But the statute allows for ‘reductions in force’ that don’t target specific employees,” wrote DOGE duumvirate Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece on Nov. 20.

One of those non-specific groups of employees are those who continue to work from home: “Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome: If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home,” the two wrote.

And, more broadly, ever since the end of his first term, Trump has sought to use a tool known as “Schedule F” — a part of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 that exempts those “whose position has been determined to be of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character” from civil service protections — to fire a large number of political appointees, as Axios noted.

This doesn’t have Beltway careerists happy: “I would say there is a general feeling of dread among everyone,” an anonymous Department of Energy employee told CNN.

As well there should be. For the rest of us taxpayers, this lump of coal should be seen as a diamond — and Sean Spicer may have, in part, helped pave the way for it.

Merry Christmas, permanent Washington!

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