President Trump’s firing of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecutorial team could be ground zero for his efforts to remake the federal government — curtailing what his supporters call the “deep state” — and to set the 47th president on a rendezvous at the Supreme Court. 

More than a dozen prosecutors who worked with Mr. Smith were given pink slips by the acting attorney general, James McHenry, who in a letter to the attorneys shared that Mr. Trump “does not trust” these officials. Mr. McHenry added that the attorneys “played a significant role in prosecuting President Trump. The proper functioning of government critically depends on the trust superior officials place in their subordinates.”

The Sun spoke to a longtime federal employment lawyer, Alan Lescht, who disclosed that his firm, more than a dozen lawyers strong, is closely monitoring possible next steps for the fired attorneys. He insists that as civil servants they are entitled to “due process rights” and can’t be fired merely because the president reckons that they are “a bunch of Democrats.” 

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins during a press conference on Monday that “it is the belief of this White House that the president was within his authority” in firing the lawyers because he is the “executive of the executive” and possesses the power to “fire anyone within the executive branch.”

Mr. Trump had vowed to fire Mr. Smith “within two seconds” of taking the oath of office, but the special counsel resigned while President Biden was in office. NBC News reports that among the fired deputies to Mr. Smith are career prosecutors Molly Gaston, J.P. Cooney, Anne McNamara, and Mary Dohrmann. Mr. Smith’s chief deputy, Jay Bratt, resigned before Mr. Trump’s term began.

The 47th president, in an executive order signed last week, explained that the “President’s power to remove subordinates is a core part of the Executive power vested by Article II of the Constitution and is necessary for the President to perform his duty to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.’” That logic informed the firing of as many as 17 inspectors general over the weekend. 

Article II ordains that “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America,” which has been interpreted to mean “all” of the executive power, not a fraction of it. The parchment, though, does not mention the power of removal — only that of appointment. The first presidential impeachment, of President Johnson, was for firing Secretary of War Stanton notwithstanding the Tenure of Office Act, which sought to ban exactly that without Senate approval. Later Supreme Court precedent suggests that the law was likely an invalid encroachment on separated powers. 

While the president can remove political appointees “at will” — meaning without cause and sans process — the law on firing civil service employees is more circumscribed. The Supreme Court in Morrison v. Olson ruled that the president could not unilaterally fire independent counsels, though that species of prosecutor went extinct when Congress failed to renew its enabling statute. 

Ms. Leavitt in her press conference also cited a Supreme Court case from 2020, Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which she asserted is the basis for the “legality” of Mr. Trump’s firings. Seila, a 5-to-4 decision, affirmed the president’s right to fire “officers” at will with certain exceptions. The justices ruled that the CFPB encroached on presidential prerogative. 

One of those exceptions to the president’s ability to fire is that Congress could protect “inferior officers with limited duties and no policymaking” if they “lacked policymaking or administrative authority and exercised narrow authority to initiate criminal investigations and prosecutions of Governmental actors identified by others.” That, though, could describe career prosecutors at the DOJ like the ones Mr. Trump fired.

The fired lawyers’ first stop for recourse could be the Merit Systems Protection Board, which describes its aspiration as protecting “Federal merit systems against partisan political and other prohibited personnel practice.” The Congressional Research Service describes the board as “a quasi-judicial independent agency in the executive branch charged with protecting federal employees against improper employment related actions.” 

The board’s charter is the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, signed into law by President Carter. The law mandates that “Employees should be protected against arbitrary action, personal favoritism, or coercion for partisan political purposes.” The board, in a report produced in 2015, explained that “when a cause is required to remove a public employee, due process is necessary to determine if that cause has been met. Neither Congress nor the President has the power to ignore or waive due process.”

The Supreme Court has held that the Constitution’s language — “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” — applies to the “property interest” federal employees hold in their jobs. Those employees are entitled to “procedural due process,” which means that the government is required to provide evidence of the reasons for termination, give advance notice of the termination, and hold a hearing on the firing.

Mr. Trump has shown great interest in reshaping the vast federal bureaucracy and this civil service regime. On Monday, his Office of Management and Budget Schedule promulgated a memorandum on “Career/Policy,” formerly known as “Schedule F.” The Civil Service Act exempts from civil service protections any federal employee “whose position has been determined to be of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character.”

The president aims to expand this category to shrink the number of employees who enjoy due process protections. Mr. Trump began that process in his first term, but Mr. Biden reversed those efforts. The 46th president accused Mr. Trump of undermining “the foundations of the civil service and its merit system principles, which were essential to the … repudiation of the spoils system.”

Mr. Lescht, the employment lawyer, tells the Sun that Mr. Biden’s efforts took the form of an official “rule,” which grants it greater durability than a mere executive order.