With all the changes occurring around us, I wanted to highlight three things of note:
- Welcome Linden. We are delighted to welcome Linden Mueller to the PEER team as Director of Development and Communications. Previously, Linden was the Director of Development and Outreach at the Great Rivers Environmental Law Center, which works to provide free and reduced-fee legal services to individuals and organizations across Missouri and its surrounding regions. Welcome aboard Linden!
- Protecting Federal Employees. PEER continues to provide counseling to hundreds of federal employees who have been illegally terminated, many of whom have now been reinstated as the result of court orders. Our goal is to ensure every federal employee working in the environmental and public health space has legal representation, either through us or others, when illegal actions are taken against them. With the purge of federal employees picking up speed, this work is more important than ever.
- Outing DOGE. We have been working hard behind the scenes to expose the illegal activities of DOGE and Elon Musk. Much of what is happening in the federal government right now can be traced back to the desire of Musk and other very wealthy individuals in the Trump administration to take over and commercialize government functions. Check out this article in The Guardian on Musk’s takeover of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) and what PEER is doing about it.
In these difficult times, thank you for all you do to support public employees and the environment.
Regards,
Tim Whitehouse
P.S. We’re grateful for the recent uptick in donations. Your support means so much during this challenging time. If you’d like to join others in backing our work, you can contribute here.
Civil Service Court Shuttered
Just as the federal government gears up for its biggest personnel upheaval in history, the civil service court will not be able to function due to a lack of quorum caused by the Trump White House. The result is that employee legal challenges to removals are unlikely to be remedied in a timely fashion for the foreseeable future, no matter how egregious the violation. Read More »
Paying Federal Employees Not to Work
The Trump administration has put more than 100,000 federal employees, nearly 5% of the civilian workforce, on paid administrative leave, costing taxpayers billions of dollars, according to our calculations. Ironically, this expensive mass idling of civil servants is being done in the name of “government efficiency,” as engineered by Elon Musk’s controversial DOGE operation. Read More »
Overlooking the Obvious: Red King Crab Collapse Due to Overfishing
Dr. C. Braxton Dew, a fisheries biologist formerly with NOAA, writes that the collapse of the Bering Sea red king crab was due to overfishing and not warming seas, as NOAA has been contending, and discusses why this contention matters. Read More »
Trump and the IGs – From Watchdogs to Lapdogs
PEER’s Jeff Ruch writes why Trump’s mass firing of Inspectors General is so troubling and why it is now an inescapable fact that IGs can no longer be expected to exercise independent judgment if these offices remain within the Executive Branch. Read More »
