Can I offer you this puppy instead of my paper?

I'm sorry!!!

I'm sure the person sitting next to me will be baffled as to why I have written what seems like a novel on airplane napkins.

When I get back from my honeymoon, I'll write a short blog post for a public audience. (In case you really don't want to trudge through 67 pages of historical legal analysis.) If I am fortunate, @donmoyn.bsky.social will agree to let me post it on his fabulous blog.

The paper is forthcoming in the Minnesota Law Review. I’m still in the editing window, so I’d be grateful for any comments or feedback. Thanks for engaging with this work. 12/12

As a policy matter, I don't love the potential legal implications of the article. But in this moment, it feels essential to identify where the guardrails are weakest and to build political momentum toward repairing them. This Article is one attempt at identifying those weak points. 11/12

The first draft of the paper (most of which now appears as Part II) feels almost quaint today. The rapid evolution of the civil service during the Trump administration has forced me to constantly rewrite this project more than any other I've worked on. Every week, the paper feels outdated. 10/12

The puzzle: Political scientists document all the ways presidents shape the workforce, while (some) legal scholars tend to view the civil service as overly insulated. So what are the legal mechanisms (if any) actually enabling the sorts of presidential control political scientists observe? 9/12

I'll leave the rest of the paper for you to discover. Instead, a few words about writing this paper at this moment. I started this paper 3 years ago, when most people still found civil service law pretty boring. Back then, the paper was an attempt to solve an intellectual puzzle. 8/12

The prevention of administrative sabotage (@david.noll.org) requires Congress to reclaim its authority over personnel policy. That task is as much legal as it is political. The current moment offers reasons to think that Congress could shift constitutional politics back in its favor. 7/12

A favorite quote from the CSRA debates:

"We often talk about the political machinations of President Nixon, and I am a severe critic of those machinations and of that President. We also talk about Mr. Carter not being that sort of man, and we sort of skip over the problem of his successor." 6/12

That's a problem! When enacting the CSRA, Congress feared that a president could behave like a "fox in a hen house" and use their statutory authority to assault the federal workforce. The Trump administration shows just how real that threat can be. 5/12

Presidents have used this authority to advance their own policy agendas—often at the expense of sound personnel management. Because the statutory standards are vague, presidents have a first-mover advantage, and courts are deferential, there are few meaningful checks on this power. 4/12

These statutory delegations predate the Pendleton Act (i.e., the foundation of the modern civil service), and they remain good law. The Article uses a series of case studies to show how presidents have relied on this authority to reshape the merit system around their own policy visions. 3/12

Most scholars look to the Constitution to explain the relationship between the president and the federal workforce. But the Constitution is largely silent. This Article instead analyzes the statutory authority Congress has delegated to the president to shape personnel policy. 2/12

I don't have time to do a full read and write up but, in short, Judge finds that the EO violates the APA, the Separations of Powers, and the Take Care Clause 2/2