scholar_vit

Posted by Ian Millhiser

https://www.vox.com/politics/489807/supreme-court-civil-service-thomas-barrett-margolin-mspb

https://www.vox.com/?p=489807

Remember DOGE, the Elon Musk-led “government efficiency” project that spread chaos during President Donald Trump’s first few months back in office, fired tens of thousands of federal employees, and then vanished almost as abruptly as it began?

If you didn’t lose your job in one of Musk’s federal employee purges, or you aren’t one of the remaining federal civil servants who has to figure out how to do your job without many of your colleagues around, DOGE is probably little more than a memory. But the legacy of this era of arbitrary firings is still being litigated in federal court, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett just handed down some very bad news for nearly every civilian who works for the federal government.

On the surface, the Supreme Court’s decision in Margolin v. National Association of Immigration Judges, which was handed down on Tuesday, is a bit removed from Elon’s brief stint as Trump’s human resources manager. The case concerns whether federal immigration judges have a First Amendment right to give public speeches about immigration law. And the full Supreme Court decided to get rid of the case using a procedural argument that has few implications for federal employees.

But Justice Clarence Thomas, in an opinion joined by Barrett, wrote a separate opinion that would allow Trump to strip all federal civil servants of employment protections that many federal workers have enjoyed since the Chester A. Arthur administration.

While Thomas often takes extreme positions, Barrett is a relative moderate who is close to the center of the GOP-controlled Supreme Court. So, if Barrett is willing to endorse Thomas’s one neat trick to abolish civil service protections, that’s a strong sign that a majority of the Court agrees with her position.

Republican judges have long backed a legal theory known as the “unitary executive,” which holds that the president must have the power to fire high-ranking government officials who lead federal agencies. But the unitary executive has not historically been understood to eliminate employment protections for civil servants and other relatively low-ranking federal employees. 

Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in Morrison v. Olson (1988), which is considered something akin to a holy text to proponents of the unitary executive, referred to the president’s power to “remove executive officers” — “officers” are relatively high-ranking government workers — but it did not say that the president must be able to fire every individual postal worker or Social Security clerk.

In Margolin, however, Thomas and Barrett suggest a way to collapse this distinction between agency leaders and ordinary civil servants. Trump can simply fire all of the government officials who adjudicate civil service disputes, and then civil servants will no longer have any enforceable rights.

Barrett, in other words, appears to believe that civil service protections only exist if the president wants them to exist. And if she says so, it’s likely the Court’s majority will, too.

Why civil service protections are essential to a modern government

If you watched the Netflix show Death by Lightning, which was about the brief presidency of James A. Garfield, or if you read the book the show was based on, you got a pretty good picture of what the president’s life was like before civil service reform.

As author Candice Millard wrote, when Garfield took office, the line of job seekers hoping to secure a federal job “began to form before he even sat down to breakfast.” By the time Garfield had finished his meal, “it snaked down the front walk, out the gate, and onto Pennsylvania Avenue.” As president, Garfield was expected to meet with each of these job-seekers and sort them into jobs — often based on whether they had a politically powerful patron.

This system was inefficient, as it forced the federal government to replace much of its workforce every time the White House changed hands. It diverted a simply enormous amount of the president’s attention into low-level hiring decisions. It fostered corruption, as often the only way to secure a federal job was to do favors for a senator, congressman, or some other powerful figure who could act as the job-seeker’s patron. And it made it very difficult for the government to hire highly specialized workers.

Why would someone go to the trouble of, say, getting an economics degree and becoming an expert on federal monetary policy if they knew that their job in the Treasury Department would evaporate the minute their party lost an election?

President Arthur signed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act in 1883, shortly after Garfield was assassinated by a disgruntled job-seeker. It was the first of several laws which ensure that the government did not have to replace every Republican postal worker or FBI agent with a Democrat if a Republican president lost an election. 

Modern civil service laws also prohibit the federal government’s political leadership from coercing civil servants into political activity. They provide protections for whistleblowers. And they generally ensure that the government will be staffed by competent professionals who provide continuity across presidential administrations.

Federal civil service laws are primarily enforced by an agency known as the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB). Civil servants who believe their rights as federal employees have been violated typically must file their case in the MSPB, which gets the first crack at adjudicating these sorts of disputes.

Early in his second presidency, however, Trump took several actions that appeared designed to shut down the MSPB. He fired one of the Board’s members, depriving the MSPB of the quorum it needs to operate. He also fired Special Counsel of the United States Hampton Dellinger, an official who investigates alleged violations of civil service laws and brings cases to the MSPB, and attempted to replace Dellinger with a far-right podcaster.

Since then, Trump has taken some actions to reinvigorate the MSPB. The Board now has two members, which is the minimum it needs to operate. The podcaster withdrew from consideration to replace Dellinger after Politico reported that the podcaster said he has a “Nazi streak in me from time to time.” And Trump later assigned Dellinger’s duties to US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.

So, while there are good reasons to believe that the MSPB is significantly diminished thanks to Trump’s actions, the Board currently has the minimum amount of personnel it needs to operate. But that was not true for the first several months of the second Trump administration, when it only had one member and thus was unable to adjudicate civil service disputes.

Barrett would let Trump abolish civil service protections by firing the MSPB’s members

The most interesting issue in the Margolin case concerns what should have happened if Trump had never appointed a second MSPB member, and thus had left the Board inoperative.

A federal appeals court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, decided Margolin in June 2025, during the period when the MSPB was defunct. That court suggested that, if the MSPB is nonfunctional, then the federal judiciary must step in and hear civil service disputes that otherwise would be heard by the MSPB — because, otherwise, federal civil service laws would cease to function. 

On Tuesday, the full Supreme Court reversed the Fourth Circuit, although it did so on narrow grounds. The full Court’s opinion in Margolin states simply that the Fourth Circuit should not have opined on what happens when the MSPB is defunct, because the plaintiffs in Margolin did not raise this issue in their briefs. 

But Thomas’s concurring opinion, which was joined by Barrett, rejects the Fourth Circuit’s argument outright. He argues that federal law says that civil servants must bring employment disputes in the MSPB, and if there is no MSPB, that means that they are simply out of luck.

Thus, as a practical matter, Trump could gain the power to fire any federal worker simply by firing one of the two current members of the MSPB. If that happened, the MSPB would cease to function, and federal civil servants would be cut off from any legal remedies, even if they were illegally fired for being Democrats.

Despite the significant implications of Barrett’s decision to join Thomas’s opinion, it isn’t particularly surprising. Last July, in McMahon v. New York (2025), the Court permitted the Trump administration to fire about half of the Department of Education’s workforce. Though the Court’s three Democrats dissented in McMahon, the Republican justices in the majority did not explain their decision; it was decided on the Court’s shadow docket, and the justices often do not explain their reasoning in those cases.

Nevertheless, McMahon was an early sign that the Court’s Republican majority does not support civil service protections, or believe that those laws should be enforced. Barrett’s decision to join Thomas’s Margolin opinion also suggests that she holds that view.

It appears, in other words, that this Supreme Court wants to tear down a consensus that was reached in 1883 — that the federal government should have a professional civil service that cannot be removed simply because the Republican Party controls the White House. Barrett’s move suggests Trump has plenty of leeway to keep firing people, even if federal law is supposed to stop him from doing so.

https://www.vox.com/politics/489807/supreme-court-civil-service-thomas-barrett-margolin-mspb

https://www.vox.com/?p=489807

Posted by Joshua Keating

https://www.vox.com/politics/489744/trump-iran-deal-ceasefire-stalemate

https://www.vox.com/?p=489744

There’s an old line, sometimes attributed to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, that the best way to solve a difficult problem is to make it bigger. That might be the most generous interpretation of how the Trump administration is approaching its ongoing peace talks with Iran. 

Over the weekend, the news around the talks followed what has now become a familiar pattern. On Saturday, the two sides were reportedly close to a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and lift the US blockade on Iran. Then on Sunday, President Donald Trump said he had told his negotiators “not to rush” into a deal. On Monday, the United States launched a new round of what it called “self-defense strikes” in southern Iran. The current message from the White House is that they’re giving talks another few days, and continue to believe believe a deal is likely, but haven’t taken a return to full-scale war off the table. 

Then in a rambling Truth Social post on Monday morning, Trump enlarged the problem by saying that it “should be mandatory” that as part of any peace deal, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey sign on to the Abraham Accords, normalizing relations with Israel. This is unlikely: Saudi-Israeli cooperation against Iran has been the worst kept secret in the Middle East for years, but the international outcry over the war in Gaza has made it politically untenable for these countries to publicly embrace Israel. It’s unclear just how seriously Trump will press for this, but the fact that at this phase in negotiations he’s bringing up new demands sure to irritate his own allies, suggests he’s not exactly desperate to wrap these talks up.

The fact that a deal still hasn’t been signed — despite the fact that the underlying dynamics of the conflict haven’t changed much since Iran and the United States signed the current ceasefire agreement  in early April — as well as the fact that Trump seems to be expanding rather than narrowing his demands suggests two things that turn the recent weeks of negotiation reports on their head: First, Trump does not believe that he is losing this war. Second, he is still hoping to reach a mega-deal to reset the politics of the entire region. 

Trump doesn’t think he’s losing

Before the war began, Trump told a concerned Tucker Carlson that despite predictions warning that attacking Iran could destroy his presidency, he was confident everything would be okay “because it always is.” The war certainly hasn’t gone as easily as expected, but it’s very possible Trump still believes he has the upper hand and that everything will work out.

In his defense, the most dire predictions of economic turmoil made when the Strait of Hormuz was closed have not come to pass. Oil prices have been hovering around $100 a barrel and Americans are feeling the impact at the pump, but it’s worth recalling that many energy experts were predicting $200 per barrel oil by now if the strait were not opened. (There are a few explanations for this, but the main ones seem to be that the US and other non-Gulf producers have been able to export more oil than many anticipated, while China has slashed its imports, relying on its substantial reserves. For all the reports of Chinese assistance to Iran’s war effort, in this respect, Beijing may be doing more to help the United States.) 

The crunch may still hit: There are global concerns about jet fuel supplies ahead of summer travel season, and the impact of the global fertilizer shortage on this planting season won’t be felt for months. But for now, the US economy is not in full-blown crisis mode, and Trump may feel he’s proved the “panicans” wrong. 

The war is broadly unpopular and a large majority of Americans say it has raised their cost of living, but according to a recent poll by the Eurasia Group’s Institute for Global Affairs, 73 percent of Republicans still approve of Trump’s handling of the situation. Fears of an America First revolt by Trump’s MAGA base also seem to have been overblown.

As long as US troops aren’t being killed — and none have been since the ceasefire began — and the economic turmoil stays manageable, Trump may continue to believe that time is on his side. On the other hand, Iran’s current leaders, who believe they can absorb more pain than the Americans and are even less sensitive to public opinion, probably believe that too. This is a recipe for stalemate. 

War to end all wars

In some respects, Trump has narrowed his goals for the war in Iran. Rather than pushing for caps on Iran’s ballistic missile program or its support for regional proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah as he did in talks prior to the war, Trump now says the “one thing” he thinks about is preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

But it would be difficult enough at this point just to get a deal over Iran’s nuclear program that satisfies what appears to be Trump’s main condition: that it be tougher than the deal Barack Obama negotiated in 2015. Though the Iranians have reportedly agreed in principle to dilute or dispose of their stockpile of highly enriched uranium, the White House is continuing to insist that the stockpile itself be turned over to the United States. “No dust, no deal,” one official told Fox News, referring to Trump’s description of the stockpile as “nuclear dust.” That became a harder circle to square last week when Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei issued a directive saying the uranium should remain on Iranian soil. 

The deal under discussion, according to most reports, simply starts a process of nuclear negotiations over a 60-day period — which would at least lower the temperature, though it leaves the main sticking point unresolved and it’s not hard to imagine the situation deteriorating again during that period. 

However, his comments linking the Abraham Accords to the resolution of the Iran war suggest that Trump, who is reportedly “bored” by Iran at this point, is thinking bigger. Trump has always expressed confidence that he alone can bring peace to the Middle East as a region, not just solve individual conflicts. Recall that when he announced his plan for ending the war in Gaza last September, he described it as a great day in the “history of civilization” that could bring “eternal peace to the Middle East.” In reality, it didn’t even bring eternal peace to Gaza, but he may be hoping to finish the job now. 

For the moment, we may be in a dynamic where the costs to Trump aren’t high enough that he feels compelled to end the war quickly, but they’re just high enough that he feels he needs a big win to justify them — whether that’s a deal that demonstrably exceeds Obama or achieves his alleged dream of “eternal peace.” 

https://www.vox.com/politics/489744/trump-iran-deal-ceasefire-stalemate

https://www.vox.com/?p=489744

Posted by Anna North

https://www.vox.com/technology/489223/ai-work-jobs-productivity-agents-claude

https://www.vox.com/?p=489223

If you’ve ever used an online patient portal to message your doctor in the middle of the night, you won’t be surprised to learn that responding to those messages takes an increasingly big bite out of clinicians’ workdays. 

So in recent years, hospitals have begun adopting an AI tool that can draft responses for them. The tool was supposed to make a time-consuming task go more quickly and smoothly, said Philip Barrison, an MD-PhD student at the University of Michigan Medical School who studies AI in healthcare.

Instead, the tool has given doctors and nurses a new to-do list. First they have to read the AI-generated response and decide if it “is actually something that they think they would say,” Barrison said. Humans are suggestible, and looking at something and deciding whether you would have thought of it on your own is a cognitively complex task.

Even if the message looks correct, the clinician still needs to “edit it to the point where they think it’s acceptable” to send to a patient, Barrison said. The AI tool introduces a totally new set of complicated judgment calls into what used to be a relatively straightforward process. As a result, many clinicians have chosen not to use it at all.

They’re fortunate to have the choice. Buoyed by expectations of cost savings and skyrocketing productivity, companies are increasingly asking (and sometimes requiring) employees to use AI to make their work more efficient. Meta, for example, last year instructed some workers to use AI to “go 5X faster by eliminating the frictions that slow us down.” The CEO of Shopify told employees they’d need to prove they “cannot get what they want done using AI” before the company would approve new hires. Some companies are even evaluating or ranking employees based on how much they use AI tools.

Workers in some sectors have found major time savings from AI. But for others, the tools just change the work rather than making it faster. Workers might be spending less time writing patient portal messages, for example, but more time editing the releases the AI tool writes. 

At best, this mismatch between employer expectations and employee reality can be an annoyance. In other cases, however, it can result in workers being laid off for failing to meet unrealistic efficiency demands. Some critics say the overzealous adoption of AI in high-stakes settings like healthcare even puts people’s lives at risk. Now workers, unions, and experts are increasingly calling for guardrails to protect employees from inflated expectations around AI — and customers, students, patients, and the general public from mistakes that can happen when managers put AI adoption above all else.

The hidden costs of AI use 

Corporations are increasingly presenting employees with a choice: Use AI to be more productive or “you’re going to be automated out of a job,” said Aiha Nguyen, director of the labor futures program at the research organization Data & Society.

But the effects of AI on productivity aren’t as straightforward as some CEOs have claimed. In one 2025 study, software developers believed AI made them faster, but in fact they took 19 percent longer to complete tasks. (The researchers tried to repeat the experiment this year but had trouble recruiting developers who would agree to work without AI.) And in a recent survey of 5,000 white-collar workers, 40 percent of rank-and-file employees said AI saved them no time at all.

Workers across heavily AI-exposed fields point to hidden timesucks that come with using the technology. Julie, an art teacher, wrote in a response to a Vox reader survey that her school’s administrators routinely suggest using AI for lesson-planning, emails, and progress report comments. She’s tried AI-generated lesson plans, but they don’t account for the fact that kids may work through an activity at different speeds.

“First, I am checking what AI suggests, then I am editing them,” she said. “Why add a step I can accomplish on my own?”

For an employee at an East Coast communications agency, an internal AI tool was supposed to speed up the process of drafting press releases and other documents about the pharmaceutical industry. 

“The goal is, I think, to be able to plug and chug into this machine and be able to turn a lot of materials around a lot quicker than we already do,” said the employee, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of career repercussions.

But when the employee tried to use it for basic research, it made too many mistakes. Double-checking its work erased any time savings. When the employee tried using it for communications with clients, its people-pleasing tendencies became a problem, as the tool put a “weird happy spin” even on messages warning of bad news.

“Part of the reason we take a human speed to turn things around is because there is so much nuance behind everything that we do,” the employee told me. “AI is just not going to be able to catch it.”

It’s not just that AI makes errors. With the advent of agentic AI, workers are increasingly being asked to edit and oversee the output of multiple AI tools, a new kind of work that can have unexpected costs. 

One recent study of 1,488 workers across industries, for example, found that excessive oversight of AI agents could lead to what the researchers called “AI brain fry,” a kind of cognitive fatigue. “Participants described a ‘buzzing’ feeling or a mental fog with difficulty focusing, slower decision-making, and headaches,” the researchers wrote in Harvard Business Review. Brain fry was also associated with an increased number of errors and an increased desire to quit one’s job. 

The researchers also found that while using one or two AI tools increased productivity, adding additional tools produced diminishing returns, and after four tools, productivity actually declined. 

What workers really want from AI

Despite such findings, companies continue to pressure employees to use AI, and to cite AI investment as a rationale for layoffs, even as companies that try to link staff reductions to AI adoption tend to struggle on the stock market.

Some workers and organizations, however, are beginning to push back. National Nurses United, the country’s largest nurses’ union, has criticized the use of AI tools in hospitals to estimate staffing needs or to recommend treatment protocols for patients.

There’s no guarantee that these tools will take into account a patient’s individual profile, including underlying medical conditions, the way human clinicians can, Cathy Kennedy, the union’s president, told me. AI is supposed to “help us do our work more efficiently, but at the end of the day, it makes it even more burdensome,” she said.

Hospitals need to evaluate, with nurses at the table, whether AI tools really work as advertised, Kennedy said. “We have to stop — we have to go back and really see if this is truly doing what it needs to do,” she said.

The same is true across industries, Barrison, the healthcare researcher, told me. “Organizations need to be prepared to say when, if they were seeking a return on investment, if they were seeking value in a technology — how do you define what that value is? And if there’s not value there anymore, how do you turn it off?”

Some workers have found ways that AI actually helps them do their work — just not the ones management expected. Julie, the art teacher, likes to use Claude to learn more about topics she’s less familiar with, like kiln-firing ceramics. 

Meanwhile, researchers have found that AI can actually reduce employee burnout, if it’s used to complete tasks employees find burdensome. “Everybody in every job has a list of things that they procrastinate on,” said Julie Bedard, a managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group who led the AI brain fry study. “Those are the places I get, unsurprisingly, a lot of enthusiasm to try AI with.”

But employers won’t find out what those burdensome tasks are unless they listen to rank-and-file employees. “Worker standards and worker rights should continue to be at the heart of all of this,” Nguyen said, “rather than just focusing too much on the AI.” 

https://www.vox.com/technology/489223/ai-work-jobs-productivity-agents-claude

https://www.vox.com/?p=489223