No. of Recommendations: 1
True, but you also can get your actions invalidated by a court if they determine it's a pretext enabling you to fire someone who is protected from being fired under the Civil Service Act and/or the First Amendment. Doing a reorg that accomplishes nothing except getting a single person fired in retribution is almost certainly going to get shot down.
After a lot of months, a lot of court hearings, and a lot of cash outlays to pay a lot of lawyers. Time is on my side, as they say.
Plus, while a federal judge might order me to re-employ them, it doesn't mean they get to go back to doing what they were doing. Hence the Alaskan Tundra Temperature project that they'd be assigned to. Or perhaps they could count trees in the Badlands of South Dakota. Either way, they won't be doing the thing that made them lucrative potential employees in the first place.
That's door #1. Behind door #2 could be a very restrictive NDA detailing what activities they might engage in during their post-governmental lives, reduction of their clearance levels to Secret (forget TS) along with stipulations on who they might have contact with inside the government.
Or they could keep suing. Good luck with that; the federal government has all of time.
Why not? How are you going to deny them their security clearances if they meet the requirements for a security clearance?
Security clearances are a privilege. There's no law that says some former official gets to keep having access. They get what they get and if I - the sole determiner of these things because Executive Branch clearances come from the Executive Branch - determine what level of access they can have. If they're counting trees for me in South Dakota they don't need much of one, do they?
You can't revoke their security clearance without providing cause for doing that.
The requirements for this are so stringent you can literally yank them from anyone. Forget to take off your Apple Watch as you walk into the entrance of a secure facility? Your clearance is gone. Being willing to discuss intelligence matters in the way they did using the veneer of the federal government to issue something that looks like an official position of said government? Beyond fireable.
It's hard to get reprisals and retribution against government employees who haven't violated any of their legal or workplace obligations.
No it's not. You just have to have an understanding of the tools at your disposal and a willingness to use them.
These 51 arseholes messed with the bull. Now they can bend over and take the horns. All it takes is someone willing to wave the red cape.
