Elon Musk Gets His Most Brutal Smackdown Yet on #DOGE Firings

The judge slammed the #MassFirings as “illegal.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/192142/elon-musk-brutal-smackdown-doge-firings

"A federal #judge has ordered the Office of Personnel Mgmt to rescind #illegal instructions to cull the workforce of federal agencies...

““The #OPM does not have any authority whatsoever under any statute in the #history of the universe, to hire & fire employees within another agency”"

Another fired employee said the hundreds of dismissals meant that the #aid agency now had only a skeleton crew to respond to #humanitarian crises.

The appointee running day-to-day operations at #USAID is #PeteMarocco, a #State Dept official overseeing foreign aid who was a #divisive figure at the agency & other government departments in the first #Trump administration. Early this month, #MarcoRubio announced he was taking over the aid agency as acting administrator.

~400 people were fired in recent days from #humanitarian assistance positions…. ~200 of those were contractors for the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, …& another 200 were part of a unit called the Support Relief Group, a collection of #crisis experts who helped the bureau in responding quickly to #NaturalDisasters & armed conflicts. Now only about a dozen people remain in that group.

In addition, 36 people were fired from the Office of Transition Initiatives, a unit in the agency’s conflict prevention bureau that specializes in helping partner countries with political transitions & #democratic initiatives, said US officials & recent agency employees.

The latest round of dismissals occurred on Friday night, when hundreds of people working for the agency’s Bureau for #Humanitarian Assistance got emails saying their jobs had been terminated. Two employees who got the emails said they were strange because they did not state any job titles specifically & did not have the recipients’ names in the “to” field. They were generic emails sent out in a large wave.