J. Brian Atwood and Kevin Byrnes write:

When Elon Musk and his youthful Department of Government Efficiency warriors boasted of taking a “chainsaw” to the U.S. Agency for International Development, they did more than destroy a government agency. They violated the law by summarily firing USAID’s public servants while placing millions of people around the world in mortal danger.

The thousands of public servants, fired without due process, care deeply about the agency’s mission. They did not deserve to be fired, nor did they deserve the efforts by the president himself to pile on by besmirching their reputation.

These actions have ramifications far beyond the impact on the individuals involved. They place every government employee at risk. Career professionals in the State Department and the intelligence community have also been summarily relieved of duty.

If the courts fail to intervene, our nation will be sent hurtling back in history to the era of the corrupt spoils system. That era ended when the Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 created a system based on merit. The law was updated in 1978 and it explicitly states that a public servant can only be removed if there is evidence of misconduct or poor performance — and only then after providing an opportunity for due process.

The administration violated this act, and we are contesting these firings in federal court. One of us is an attorney who has represented federal employees for more than three decades. The other served as the head of USAID for over six years in the Clinton administration.

DOGE made no real effort to determine what would be lost, including millions of lives. And it showed no empathy for USAID’s career employees, a professional staff that had made the agency a global leader in development cooperation. [Continue reading…]