"Judge William Alsup's point that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) can hire and fire its own people, but it can't order other departments or agencies to do that, he's probably right," says John Malcolm of The Heritage Foundation. "That's very easily correctible. You now just need the Cabinet secretaries to say, 'This isn't coming from the Office of Personnel Management, it's coming from me,' and that's exactly what they're going to do."
Malcolm adds that Judge Alsup has "a bit of a history with the Trump administration."
"This is the same judge who declared during Trump's first administration that Trump could not revoke the DACA program that had been created by Barack Obama," says Malcolm.
Pointing to this case involving probationary employees, Malcolm says Alsup uttered all kinds of things that showed his bent. For starters, that probationary employees are the lifeblood of our government. Alsup also questioned how could so much of the workforce be amputated suddenly overnight?
Alsup was nominated by President Bill Clinton.
"It's so irregular and so widespread and so aberrant in the history of our country, how could this all happen with each agency deciding on its own to do something so aberrational?'" recalls Malcolm. "It is aberrational, it may be for the first time in our history, and Donald Trump is doing lots of stuff that is aberrational for the first time in our history, but so far, I have yet to see a single Cabinet member who has said 'Well, Mr. President, I know you want me to do this, but I'm just not going to do it.'"
