U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson excoriated the Trump administration in a scathing order Wednesday that will keep Hampton Dellinger, a top federal watchdog, in his job for now.
The White House attempted to fire Dellinger last week in what Dellinger argues was an illegal termination. The Senate had confirmed him in February 2024 to lead the Office of Special Counsel, an agency that enforces whistleblower protections and political corruption laws. Under existing federal statutes, he is expected to serve a five-year term and can only be removed by the president for inefficiency, malfeasance or neglect of duty.
Dellinger said he received no explanation for his firing in an abrupt email last week from Sergio Gor, assistant to the president and director of the presidential personnel office.
In her Wednesday order, Jackson wrote that Dellinger would remain special counsel of the OSC through at least Feb. 26 and bristled at the Trump administration’s suggestions that keeping him in his role temporarily would be “disruptive” or harmful.
“There are no facts to suggest that an order maintaining Dellinger in the role he occupied for the past year would have a ‘disruptive’ effect on any administrative process; if anything, it would be his removal that is disruptive, as he suggests,” Jackson wrote.
“[A]ny disruption to the work of the agency was occasioned by the White House,” she wrote in a footnote of her order Wednesday. “It’s as if the bull in the china shop looked back over his shoulder and said, ‘What a mess!’”
Trump’s Justice Department moved swiftly earlier this week to replace Dellinger with Doug Collins, the secretary of veterans affairs and acting head of the Office of Government Ethics. The department did this even as the court issued an administrative stay to keep Dellinger in his post while it considered a request for a temporary restraining order on his removal.
The DOJ then rushed to appeal Jackson’s administrative stay, saying the judge was engaging in “an extraordinary intrusion into the President’s authority” and demanding that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia step in. That court responded Wednesday by informing the Trump administration that it lacked jurisdiction to appeal Jackson’s order and further, that federal attorneys had failed to prove why a rush job was needed anyway.
Jackson also pushed back on Wednesday against the administration’s claim that there was no irreparable harm done by dismissing Dellinger. The DOJ had argued that Dellinger could simply be restored to the role if his lawsuit prevailed.
But that was “not the point” of Dellinger’s claim, Jackson wrote.
Whether the OSC is “still up and running in some format, with some person at the helm,” Dellinger argues the absence of a leader who was lawfully appointed to fulfill the duties of the special counsel makes it impossible to know whether key elements of the job are actually being fulfilled.
That includes guarding sensitive information that is required by law to be kept secret.
This and other factors will be considered at a preliminary injunction hearing on Feb. 26 in Jackson’s courtroom in Washington, D.C.
The fight between Dellinger and the Trump administration rages as the president continues to threaten to flout court orders or find ways to skirt them.
Neither the Justice Department nor the White House immediately responded to a request for comment Thursday.