Hampton Dellinger, head of the federal government’s independent watchdog agency, ended his fight to keep his job on Thursday, bowing to President Trump’s effort to remove a key figure scrutinizing the recent mass firings of federal workers.
As chief of the Office of Special Counsel, Mr. Dellinger is charged with investigating appeals from federal employees who believe they have been wrongly dismissed. Less than 24 hours earlier, he had announced that his office had successfully obtained an order that temporarily allows thousands of Department of Agriculture employees swept up in Elon Musk’s government-gutting effort to get back to work.
But within hours, an appeals court ruled that Mr. Trump had a sound argument for firing him and granted the government’s request that Mr. Dellinger remain sidelined during the appeals process. Mr. Dellinger had been fighting his own dismissal ever since he received notice of it in February, and a lower court had agreed with his argument that the president had overstepped.
During his temporary reinstatement, he focused on investigating the government’s sweeping terminations of employees with probationary status and who were relatively new to their government positions.
“My fight to stay on the job was not for me, but rather for the ideal that O.S.C. should be as Congress intended: an independent watchdog and a safe, trustworthy place for whistle blowers to report wrongdoing and be protected from retaliation,” Mr. Dellinger said in a statement on Thursday. He said the appellate judges’ decision “effectively erased” the independence of that office.
It was not immediately clear what would happen to the investigations Mr. Dellinger was pursuing now that he is stepping away from the job.
Christopher Bonk, an employment lawyer with the firm Gilbert Employment Law, said he hoped the office would continue Mr. Dellinger’s work.
“Though some of that is potentially contingent upon who ends up being the next special counsel in the interim,” he told reporters on Thursday.
Mr. Bonk’s firm is representing thousands of government employees in a class-action appeals lawsuit that challenges the mass firings of probationary employees directly to the Merit Systems Protection Board, bypassing filing complaints with the Office of Special Counsel.
