# Hampton Dellinger **Hampton Dellinger** is a lawyer who headed the [[Office of Special Counsel]], the small independent agency that protects federal whistleblowers and enforces the [[Hatch Act]], from March 2024 until President [[Donald Trump]] fired him in February 2025. He sued, won his job back for about three weeks, used that time to try to halt the mass firing of probationary federal workers, and then dropped his case when an appeals court let his removal take effect. **Why it matters:** Dellinger's firing was the first of the second Trump administration's removals of a watchdog-agency head to reach the Supreme Court, and the first real test of whether the laws that protect such officials from being fired at will still held. His decision to stop fighting, on the judgment that he would lose at the Supreme Court, proved accurate: in June 2026 the Court held in [[Trump v. Slaughter]] that the President may remove independent-agency leaders without cause. ## Background Dellinger was born in 1967 in Oxford, Mississippi, the son of Walter Dellinger, a constitutional law professor who served as acting Solicitor General under President Bill Clinton. He graduated from the University of Michigan and Yale Law School and clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Most of his career was built in North Carolina. He was legal counsel to Governor Mike Easley from 2001 to 2003, practiced at North Carolina firms, and ran for lieutenant governor in 2008, losing the Democratic primary to Walter Dalton. He later practiced in Washington at Boies Schiller Flexner. President [[Joe Biden]] made him Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department's [[Office of Legal Policy]], where he served from 2021 to 2023. Biden then nominated him as Special Counsel. The Senate confirmed him 49–47 on February 27, 2024, to a five-year term, and he was sworn in on March 6, 2024. ## The firing and the lawsuit On February 7, 2025, Dellinger received a brief email from the White House removing him, with no reason given. The law creating his office allows the President to remove the Special Counsel only for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." The head of the Office of Government Ethics was fired around the same time. - **February 10.** Dellinger sued. The case, *Dellinger v. Bessent*, named Treasury Secretary [[Scott Bessent]] among the defendants. Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the federal district court in Washington ordered him temporarily restored. - **February 21.** The Justice Department had asked the Supreme Court to let the firing take effect. The Court declined to act, holding the request until Jackson's temporary order expired. Justices Gorsuch and Alito would have sided with the government; Justices Sotomayor and Jackson would have denied the request outright. - **March 1.** Jackson ruled that the firing was unlawful and ordered Dellinger reinstated. - **March 5.** The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit put her ruling on hold, letting the removal take effect while the appeal went forward. - **March 6.** Dellinger dropped the case. He said his odds at the Supreme Court were long and that a fight lasting up to a year would leave him unable to do the job even if he won. "I'm glad I tried," he told NPR. ## Three weeks back in office While restored to his post, Dellinger turned the office against the [[Valentine's Day Massacre (2025)]], the mass firing of probationary employees then under way. On February 21 he asked the [[Merit Systems Protection Board]] to pause the firings of six probationary workers for 45 days while his office investigated, arguing that firing them without individual cause was likely a [[Prohibited Personnel Practice]]. "All federal employees, including those in a probationary status, should be evaluated based on individual performance," he said. He then sought the same protection for thousands more. On March 5, the day his removal took effect, the board ordered the Agriculture Department to reinstate nearly 6,000 fired probationers for 45 days at the office's request. He said afterward that he believed every fired probationary employee should be reinstated. ## After leaving office In August 2025 Dellinger joined the law firm Foley Hoag as a partner in Washington, saying he would represent companies in court challenges to presidential orders. Asked about his old office, he said: "Now that the president can dismiss employees at his will, I don't think we can call it an independent agency." The office went without a Senate-confirmed head until [[Charles Baldis]] was sworn in as Special Counsel in August 2026. ## Connections - [[Office of Special Counsel]] · [[Merit Systems Protection Board]] · [[Hatch Act]] · [[Prohibited Personnel Practice]] - [[Valentine's Day Massacre (2025)]] · [[Probationary Period]] · [[OPM v. AFGE]] - [[Trump v. Slaughter]] · [[Unitary Executive Theory]] · [[Criminalizing Whistleblowers]] - [[Charles Baldis]] · [[Scott Bessent]] · [[Office of Legal Policy]]