It’s not just former President Donald Trump that didn’t want to leave his job when he was fired, but one of his appointees, too. President Joe Biden recently fired Social Security commissioner Andrew Saul, but he refused to leave the agency. After he was fired, he insisted that he was going back to work, but that didn’t work out too well, according to The Washington Post. When you’re fired, you’re just not supposed to show up at work anyway. This is like when you have a roommate that doesn’t pay their rent but they refuse to vacate the premises. This is Trump World in a nutshell.
According to the report, Saul, 78, — a wealthy former women’s apparel exec and Republican donor — found that his access to agency computers had been revoked, even as his acting replacement moved to undo his policies.
“I’m here to do the job,” Saul said from his home in Katonah, N.Y., where he had led the agency since the coronavirus pandemic forced most operations to shift in March 2020 to remote work, “but I can’t do anything with the communications shut down.”
Dude, you were fired.
In an email, Saul described his firing, and that of his deputy David Black as a “palace coup” that he claimed had blindsided him, given that his six-year term was not set to expire until 2025.
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“There will be more,” Saul insisted. “Stay tuned.”
Oh, and there was.
“His acting successor, Biden appointee Kilolo Kijakazi, took the reins Monday and was briefed by her staff on the agency’s top priorities, advocates in touch with her office said, including much anticipated planning for the safe reopening of Social Security’s national network of 1,200 field offices,” the outlet reports. “The agency has been under pressure for months from lawmakers in both parties to return to
serving the public in person after complaints from constituents who do not have access to the Internet.”
“Acting Commissioner Kijakazi is engaging with her leadership team across the agency as she transitions into her new job,” spokesman Mark Hinkle wrote in an email to the Post. Saul’s name and that of deputy commissioner David Black, who resigned Friday following a request from the White House, were stripped from the agency’s organization chart.”
Meanwhile, experts in federal personnel law said it was doubtful that Saul could successfully sue the administration to get his job back. And the kicker is that Saul served on the board of a conservative think tank that has called for cuts to Social Security benefits, and yet, he wanted to stay on to serve as Social Security commissioner.
You can read the full report here.
Featured image via Gage Skidmore/Flickr, under Creative Commons license 2.0/Wikimedia
