Removing the whistleblower protector: the Special Counsel firing

Editor's note: a federal court ruled the removal unlawful because the law allows it only for cause and none was given.

At 7:22 p.m. on February 7, 2025, Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger received an email from Presidential Personnel Director Sergio Gor terminating him, with no explanation. The Office of Special Counsel is the independent agency that protects federal whistleblowers from retaliation and enforces the Hatch Act. Its head serves a five-year term and, under the statute, may be removed only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office; the court later found that the email 'contained no reasons whatsoever.' The firing came in the same weeks as the inspector general purge and the removal of the ethics office director.

Dellinger sued. On February 21, 2025 the Supreme Court held the government's application to vacate a temporary restraining order in abeyance, over a dissent by Justices Gorsuch and Alito, and on March 1 Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled for Dellinger and blocked his removal. On March 5 a D.C. Circuit panel lifted her order, allowing the administration to replace him while the judges weighed the appeal; on March 6 Dellinger abandoned his challenge, and the Supreme Court denied the government's application as moot.

Whistleblowers are a primary channel through which insiders expose fraud, waste and self-dealing. Removing the official who protects them from retaliation, while oversight elsewhere was being dismantled, removed a way for abuses inside the administration to surface other than through leaks or litigation.