Of course you can fire a civil servant. With someone in the senior executive service position a person gives up all rights to recourse and can be fired for any reason.
Well apparently you are wrong since all those VA employees who were fired for abusing our vets have just been rehired.
Careerists on the merit system are protected by Pendleton and the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board .
The President. cannot. directly. fire. a. careerist.
Political appointees are not protected.
Why, WHY, do I have to keep schooling you nimrods? The legacy of Pendleton and the creation of the MSPB are well-known! You Ronlims have got to stop f-ing up this simple sh!t, you look cheap and stupid.
CNN: Could Trump fire Fauci and what would that look like?MS: The President could not fire Fauci without cause. There are civil service protections for career federal employees that prevent them from being removed or demoted for political reasons.
CNN: When you say political reasons, what does that mean?
MS: I’ll give a tiny bit of history because it’s interesting and it goes back actually to 1881 when President James Garfield was assassinated by a would-be job seeker.
We had a spoils system that had dominated the government employment base and it didn’t work. You had people coming into positions of public import who were there not because of their capability but because of their political connections and in a remarkable turnaround, then-Vice President Chester Arthur, who was a product of that spoils system himself supported legislation – the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act – that was a game-changer and professionalized the government employee base.
And it began a long process of making it more and more merit-based. And part of the outcome of that assassination then was a rule system that does not allow political leaders to remove or demote career civil servants without justification.
So the President would not in this context be able to fire Dr. Fauci on the basis of not liking what Tony Fauci had to say.
CNN: So it sounds like there are quite a few protections that separate him from, say, a Trump Cabinet pick whom the President could fire via a Tweet.
MS: Exactly right. A Senate-confirmed political appointee serves at the pleasure of the President. So the President may fire really for any reason a senior political appointee.
CNN: If Trump did attempt to remove Fauci, could you walk through what that would look like? Would you have to go through Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar?
MS: The President of United States couldn’t directly fire a career civil servant. They would have to go to someone in their chain of command. And so in this instance you’d have HHS Secretary Alex Azar or the Director for the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins.
CNN: OK. And even if someone in the chain of command were willing to dismiss Fauci, there are channels for him to appeal it?
MS: That’s correct. So he would have to be given, first, notice of what the allegation was. It would have to be misconduct or failure to follow orders or whatever else it might be. Then you have an opportunity to respond. And if the decision was still made to fire him, he could go to the Merit Systems Protection Board and ultimately to a court to claim that he was fired in violation of the civil service rules.