Dismissals at Justice Dept. Would Bypass Civil Service and Whistle-Blower Laws

The Justice Department is accelerating its efforts to undo decades of civil service protections intended to insulate the work of law enforcement officials from political interference, according to current and former officials, ramping up a wave of firings in recent days.

A new batch of more than 20 career employees at the department and its component agencies were fired on Friday, including the attorney general’s own ethics adviser, Joseph W. Tirrell. Others who were dismissed included a handful of senior officials at the U.S. Marshals Service, as well as prosecutors and support staff who once worked for Jack Smith when he was a special counsel prosecuting Donald J. Trump.

On the surface, the various groups have little in common. Justice Department veterans, however, see an overarching pattern: a quickening effort by the Trump administration to ignore and eventually demolish longstanding civil service legal precedents meant to keep politics out of law enforcement work, and to give more leeway to the president’s loyalists.

The latest round of dismissals appears to have picked up steam after the Supreme Court last week allowed, for the time being, the administration to go forward with mass layoffs of federal workers. The decision gave the president more legal leeway to fire people en masse, at least for now.

Posting on a networking site on Monday, Mr. Tirrell asserted that he had been fired without cause and shared his termination notice from Attorney General Pam Bondi. The letter misspelled his name and did not offer a specific reason for his dismissal, saying only that the Constitution authorized it.

Employment law experts say such letters are at odds with decades of case law, as well as the decisions of an obscure part of the federal government called the Merit Service Protection Board. Taken together, both have stood for the principle that career civil servants can be fired only for cause.