Judge halts firing of intel agency personnel involved with DEI
U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga issued an order Tuesday pausing the firings after a hearing in Alexandria, Virginia, in response to a lawsuit filed by intelligence officers who said the dismissals violated their constitutional rights and federal law.
Trenga, an appointee of President George W. Bush, issued an administrative stay directing the agencies to keep the employees on administrative leave while barring any effort to cut off their pay or fire them.
The brief written order from Trenga doesn't give a detailed reason for the stay but says he wanted 'clarification as to what Agency regulations are implicated in this case and the potential irreparable harm' to the plaintiffs, who were fired as part of Trump's efforts to end DEI programs in the federal government.
A lawyer for the intelligence officials, all of whom were identified by pseudonyms in the lawsuit, welcomed the ruling.
'We're very gratified by the judge deciding to do an administrative stay for a week, basically, while the government answered some of his questions,' attorney Kevin Carroll said.
Carroll said his clients began getting messages over the weekend to report Tuesday to a visitor center with their official identification, a request he said typically signals a looming dismissal. He said the employees received notices specifying Trump's executive order ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs as the reason.
'They say this is to comply with the executive order, which is really dumb because the executive order talks about ending DEI functions. It doesn't say you have to fire DEI personnel. And nobody is hired into the CIA to be a DEI guy. It's a rotational duty, like you have in the Army or anywhere else,' Carroll said. 'So, they can simply just reassign these people back to being an analyst or scientist or case officer, whatever they did before instead of firing them. It's arbitrary and capricious.'
Spokespeople for the CIA and ODNI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
One looming legal issue in the case is the breadth of the government's power to dismiss intelligence agency employees without recourse to the courts. Notices given to some employees who sued said they were being dismissed under the CIA director's authority to dismiss anyone whose employment is deemed by the director not to be in the interest of the United States.
However, Carroll said that provision can be invoked only for individuals deemed unsuitable on national security grounds and not for other reasons.
'The paperwork from the CIA is relying solely on this subsection of the National Security Act, which says the director can do whatever he wants, which the Supreme Court has made clear applies only to national security,' the attorney said.
Trenga set another hearing in the case for Feb. 24.
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