Gerald Connolly, 75, Top Democrat on House Oversight Committee, Is Dead

Representative Gerald E. Connolly of Virginia, a feisty Democrat who prided himself on getting things done, and who defeated Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York to become his party’s top member of the powerful House Oversight Committee, died on Wednesday at his home in Fairfax County, Va. He was 75.

His family announced the death. Mr. Connolly said late last year that he had esophageal cancer and would fight the disease. But in April, he told his constituents that the treatments had been unsuccessful and that he would not seek re-election in 2026.

A nine-term congressman from the affluent suburbs of Northern Virginia, Mr. Connolly vigorously defended the interests of the legions of government workers who live in his district, whether by extending the Washington Metro to their communities or by battling President Trump’s efforts to weaken civil service job protections for the federal work force.

Mr. Connolly fought an executive order issued by Mr. Trump in 2020, near the end of the president’s first term, to strip job protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants by reclassifying them as so-called Schedule F political appointees who could be fired at will. The order was reversed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

This year, as Mr. Trump launched his second term in office with shock-and-awe orders aimed at purging what he viewed as “deep state” resistance to his policies, Mr. Connolly spoke out.

“Trump is on a wrecking cruise to de-professionalize the civil service and threaten basic services to Americans,” he told The New York Times in January. “It’s unlawful firings and impoundments that threaten to unravel 142 years” of the tradition of a “civil service immune from partisan politics.”