So who can the President fire?

Further to a discussion way of the topic in another thread, after looking into the matter, the following seems generally true:

1. The President can fire what are called principal officers. They're Cabinet Secretaries and heads of Federal Agencies (except that at least one appointment is for life), essentially those who need Congressional assent, but not including the federal judiciary. Basically, if the president appointed them, or a president appointed them in the case of holdovers like Sally Yates, the President can fire them, except for the judiciary appointed for life.

2. There are other whole classes of executive officers who are appointed by the President who serve at his pleasure. US Attorneys are one example. They can be fired at any time for any or no reason. Every four years the convention is that such classes offer their resignations to the incoming President.

3. There are some agencies whose employees are outside the civil service, like the FBI, and they're relatively easy to fire, as the Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was a couple of days before he could have resigned on pension, and a whole roster of very senior FBI officials were also fired for misconduct in the Hillary Clinton emails matter, for lying to a FISA court about the so-called Russia dossier, and for demonstrable political bias.

4. The greater mass of civil servants cannot be fired without a whole lot of palaver and waste of time, even for incompetence. "The failings in our civil service are encouraged by a system that makes it very difficult to fire someone even for gross misconduct..." John McCain said. "We must do away with the current system that treats federal employment as a right and makes dismissal a near impossibility." https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...mcain-federal/

5. Note that the Vice-President, though presumably a principal officer, cannot be fired by the President, for the same reason that the president can't fire Members of Congress, because the vice-presidency is an elected position, not an appointment by the president.

Andre Jute
It's shameful that I should do my own research when there are so many Americans here