A group of former government workers who say they were fired as part of the Trump administration’s DEI-related cutbacks filed a class action lawsuit Wednesday against top officials and 27 federal agencies, including the CIA, NASA and the Treasury Department.
The former employees, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, are asking for their jobs back — along with back pay, lost benefits, and a scrub of the new gaps in their resume.
The lawsuit refers to President Donald Trump’s anti-DEI crusade as “targeted actions intended to punish perceived political enemies, as well as to eliminate from the federal workforce women, people of color, and those … who advocated for or were perceived as advocating for protected racial or gender groups.” It was filed in D.C. federal court and had not yet been assigned to a particular U.S. district judge by mid-afternoon.
The legal complaint targets Trump’s day-one, anti-DEI executive order, which accused the Biden administration of forcing “illegal and immoral discrimination programs” that “demonstrated immense public waste and shameful discrimination.”
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The four people named as plaintiffs include Stephanie Fell, a white woman who was deputy director of the Department of Homeland Security’s anti-discrimination group; Stephanie Gilliard, a Black woman who was a “diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility coordinator” at the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review; L.L. Smith, a Black woman who was a program specialist at the National Institutes of Health; and Mahri Stainnak, who is described as a “non-binary white individual” who spent 16 years working for the federal government and was a talent innovation director at the Office of Personnel Management.
Although Trump has railed against DEI initiatives as a cultural aberration — one that he claims has undermined merit-based employment — the lawsuit casts the practice as merely the latest iteration in the nation’s lost history of making the hiring process more fair to everyone. ACLU lawyers point to the 1883 Pendleton Act that championed merit-based hiring over the traditional old boys network that dominated politics in that day, drawing a through line from that to the 1964 Civil Rights Act that knocked down racial barriers and on to the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act that solidified the career status of government jobs.
But it’s the CSRA that forms something of a sticking point, because federal workers in this lawsuit also claim that the congressionally established process for contesting terminations has been undermined by the Trump White House’s decision to shut down the little-known panel that considers those administrative complaints. In August, NOTUS documented how the president had functionally halted the only legally permitted venue for fired employees to challenge firing decisions by denying a quorum at the Merit Systems Protection Board. As a result, there’s now a massive backlog of petitions and no way to finalize them, which means former workers can’t get their jobs back even if they win.
Fell, Gilliard and Stainnak all claim that they “exhausted” their options at the MSPB, which is why they’re turning to federal courts instead. So far, judges have been reluctant to step in and assert jurisdiction over these kinds of cases, because the law says that the administrative board is the proper venue. But this lawsuit is the latest to argue that it’s long past time for federal judges to step in.
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